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ENCOUNTERS OF
THE FOURTH KINO

"Fascinating—

Qgipelliif, mmlying, s ^
haunting, yul « n H r« I v
rational . . •
A SiIMiMmU*'
—Jhe Haitian)'* $U

KMUi

Acclaim for Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind

"This is solid investigative journalism at its best brought to bear on a con-
troversial subject. Whether you have read many books on the subject or
none, this serious and thought-provoking study will keep you enthralled.
A must read for anyone who is interested in what is really happening to
these people." — Anne Rice

"May be the clearest and most comprehensive assessment of the phe-
nomenon to date." — The Dallas Morning News

"Brings a rare combination of skepticism and open-mindedness to the
tortured debate about the flying saucer phenomenon. . . . The book
chronicles the way an astonishing body of data pushed Bryan to ques-
tion his most deeply rooted beliefs about reality."

— San Francisco Examiner

"As in his brilliant Friendly Fire, C.D.B. Bryan has dared to give uncon-
ventional wisdom its due and has come upon a tantalizing puzzle."

—Tom Wolfe

"Eye-opening ... A solid, witty, one-of-a-kind work."

— Boston Sunday Herald

"An engrossing work on unearthly visitors, written for a nonbeliever."

— Kirkus Reviews

"Mr. Bryan brought to the task the courage of a classic pioneer, the

skepticism of an indomitable journalist, and the intellectual rigor of a

scientist. If you are even remotely interested in alien visitation lore and

speculation, reading this book would be a good thing."

—The Baltimore Sun

ARKANA

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

Courtlandt Dixon Barnes Bryan graduated from Yale Uni-
versity in 1958. He sold his first short story to The New
Yorker in 1961. His articles have appeared in The New York
Times Magazine, The New Republic, Esquire, and Rolling
Stone. Bryan has been a recipient of grants from the National
Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation.
He is the author of The National Air & Space Museum, The
National Geographic Society, Friendly Fire, and three works
of fiction, P.S. Wilkinson, The Great Dethriffe, and Beautiful
Women; Ugly Scenes. He lives in Guilford, Connecticut.

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS
OF THE
FOURTH KIND

A Reporter's Notebook on
Alien Abduction, UFOs, and
the Conference at M.I. T.

C. D. B. Bryan

PENGUIN

ARKANA

Published by the Penguin Group
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First published in the United States of America by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. 1995
Reprinted by arrangement with Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
Published in Arkana 1996

13579 10 8642

Frontispiece: Louise Bourgeois, The Puritan, plate I, variant. 1990.
Engraving with chine colle, with pencil and ink additions;
plate: 16 3/4 x 10 11/16". The Museum of Modern Art,
New York. Gift of the artist. Photograph © 1995
The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Owing to limitations of space, all permissions to reprint from
previously published material can be found
immediately following the index.

ISBN 0-679-42975-1 (he.)
ISBN 0 14 01.9527 0 (pbk.)
LC 95-76563

Printed in the United States of America
Set in Garamond Old Style

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to
the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,
re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's
prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that 'in
which it is published and without a similar condition including this
condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

For Brandon and Mary Anne

When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains,
however improbable, must be the truth.

— Sherlock Holmes,
in Arthur Conan Doyle's
The Sign of Four

Contents

Acknowledgments Xl

i Background 3

1 1 At the Conference: Day One 1 1

in At the Conference: Day Two 3 3

1 v At the Conference: Day Three 6 5

v At the Conference: Day Four 141

v 1 At the Conference: Day Five 1 9 8

v 1 1 Postconference Interview: Carol and Alice

in Boston 201

vim Postconference Interview: David E.

Pritchard, Ph.D. 23 1

1 x Postconference Interview: Richard J.

Boylan,Ph.D. 23 7

x Postconference Interview: Pat 2 5°

x 1 Postconference Interview: John E. Mack, M.D. 2 5 4

x 1 1 Postconference Interview: John G. Miller, M.D. 2 7 9

xiii Postconference Interview: Carol and Alice at

Their Horse Farm 282

x 1 v Postconference Interview: Carol and Alice —

First Hypnosis Session at Budd Hopkins's Studio 3 1 5

Contents

xv Postconference Interview: Brenda, Erica, Terry,
and Linda Cortile — Abductee Support Group
Meeting at Budd Hopkins 's Studio

334

xvi Postconference Interview: Carol and Alice —

Second Hypnosis Session at Budd Hopkins 's Studio 339

xvii Postconference Interview: Carol and Alice —

Third Hypnosis Session at Budd Hopkins 's Studio 358

xviii Postconference Interview: Carol and Alice —

Fourth Hypnosis Session at Budd Hopkins 's Studio 383

xix Postconference Interview: Carol and Alice —

Fifth Hypnosis Session at Budd Hopkins 's Studio 402

x x Various Theories 416

Notes

451

Bibliography
Index

459
467

Acknowledgments

I wish to acknowledge the kindness shown me by various people during the
writing of this book, beginning with Brenda Helen Cummings, R.D.T.,
who first alerted me to the 1992 Abduction Study Conference at M.I.T. and
then introduced me to some of the key written sources.

Next would come those I met and interviewed in Cambridge and af-
terwards: the conference's co-chairmen, Harvard psychiatrist John E. Mack,
M.D., and M.I.T. physicist David E. Pritchard, Ph.D., who graciously per-
mitted me to attend and, subsequendy, openly shared their thoughts about
the abduction experience with me.

I am grateful, also, to Budd Hopkins, the phenomenon's pioneering
chronicler, who was extraordinarily generous in sharing his data, tech-
niques, and information; Temple University historian David M. Jacobs,
Ph.D., who provided both a historical context for, and an often amusing
sense of perspective about, the UFO movement in addition to the structure
of abductions; and folklorist Thomas E. Bullard, Ph.D., whose erudite
scholarship made my task so much the easier.

I wish to thank, as well, John G. Miller, M.D., and Richard J. Boylan,
Ph.D., both of whom contributed more of their time and thoughts than I
had any right to expect; journalist Linda Moulton Howe, whose sense of
wonder was infectious; Keith Basterfield and Jenny Randies for their dili-
gent "foreign correspondings"; and John S. Carpenter, M.S.W., whose ex-
ample inspired me to strive for a similar blend of professionalism and caring
in this work.

I am grateful also to the abductees who permitted me to interview
them— especially "Carol" and "Alice"— whose confidences and trust I have
tried to deserve.

In addition, I would like to thank my editor, Vicky Wilson, who gives
the lie to John Cheever's observation that "the relationship between a writer
and his editor is that of a knife-to-the-throat" Vicky's elegant surgery was
limited to the page and her encouragements made this book a pleasure to
write.

XII

Acknowledgments

I would be remiss, too, if I did not here express my appreciation to my
agent, Lynn Nesbit, for her continuing efforts on my behalf.

And this is as good a place as any to acknowledge those writers I have
not already mentioned who have gone before me — Keith Thompson, Fred
Alan Wolf, Timothy Good, Howard Blum, and J. Allen Hynek, in particu-
lar — whose works and ideas I looted like an Attila the Hun.

Finally, there are reoccurring phrases authors use to express their grati-
tude to their spouses and children for putting up with them through the
writing of a book No words adequately convey, however, how gratified I am
by my wife and family's continued enthusiastic support and willingness to
stick around.

Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind

CHAPTER I

Background

Dear Colleague," the letter dated February 28, 1992, begaa "We are orga-
nizing a scientific conference to assess the similarities and differences in the
findings of various investigators studying people who report experiences of
abductions by aliens, and the related issues of this phenomenon.

"One of the features of this conference," the letter continued, "will be
an abductee panel with abductees drawn widely from the community. If
you have investigated an abductee who is articulate and thoughtful and has
had particularly interesting and/or manifold experiences, please send us
his/her name and address and a brief paragraph about why this person
would be a desirable participant."

The five-day conference, the letter explained, was to be held at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology from June 13 through June 17; its co-
chairmen were M.I.T. physicist David E. Pritchard and Harvard psychia-
trist John E. Mack. The letter's return address was Pritchard's office in the
physics department at M.I.T, the university at which the fifty-one-year-old
Harvard Ph.D. professor has taught and pursued research in atomic and
molecular physics since 1968. In 1991 Pritchard was presented the presti-
gious Broida Prize, awarded biannually for outstanding experimental ad-
vances in the fields of atomic, molecular, and optical physics.

John E. Mack, M.D., Pritchard's co-chairman, is a sixty-three-year-old
cum laude graduate of the Harvard Medical School and former head of the
Department of Psychiatry at the Cambridge Hospital, Harvard Medical
School, where he has been a professor of psychiatry for the past twenty
years. He is the founding director of the Center for Psychological Studies in
the Nuclear Age, has won acclaim for his studies on suicide, and has testi-
fied before Congress on the psychological impact of the nuclear weapons
competition on children and adolescents. In addition to having authored or
co-authored over 150 scientific papers that have appeared in learned psychi-
atric and academic journals, textbooks, and other publications, Dr. Mack
wrote the 1977 Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Lawrence of Arabia, A
Prince of Our Disorder: The Life ofT. £ Lawrence.

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

One might reasonably except that a "scientific conference" on such a sub-
ject as people who have reported their abductions by "little green men"
ought to be dismissed out of hand. And it certainly would have been but for
the credentials of those chairing it, the site of the conference — that "high
church of technology," as the Whole Earth Catalogs Stewart Brand has
called M.I.T. — and the disturbing credibility, generally speaking, of the
hundreds of individuals who, uncontaminated by exposure to any previous
unidentified flying object lore or to each other, have so hesitantly, reluc-
tantly, timidly come forward with their utterly incredible accounts of hav-
ing been abducted and examined in UFOs not by "little green men" but
rather, for the most part, by spindly-limbed, 3X-to-4X-foot-tall telepathic
gray creatures with outsized foreheads dominated by huge, compelling,
tear-shaped black eyes. And it is in the similarities of these abductees' sto-
ries and the consistency of their details that the true mystery lies. For, as
John Mack would ask at the Abduction Study Conference, "if what these
abductees are saying is happening to them isn't happening, what is?"

Those invited to the conference were asked to read two publications prior
to attending. The first was David M. Jacobs's Secret Life: Firsthand Accounts
of UFO Abductions, a detailed, quasi-scholarly examination of the abduc-
tion experience testimony of some sixty individuals whom Dr. Jacobs, an as-
sociate professor of history at Temple University, had interviewed over a
four-year period. In the course of that study, Jacobs uncovered approxi-
mately three hundred abduction experiences.

The central focus of the alien-abduction program is, according to Jacobs,
the collection of human eggs and sperm. He, like his mentor, the New York
artist and abduction-phenomenon authority Budd Hopkins, supports the
most sinister explanation for the aliens' presence among us: they are, as Hop-
kins wrote in his book Intruders, engaged in "an ongoing genetic study," and
"the human species, itself, is the subject of a breeding experiment." 1

"One of the purposes for which UFOs travel to Earth is to abduct hu-
mans to help aliens produce other Beings," Jacobs wrote in Secret Life. "It is
not a program of reproduction, but one of production. They are not here to
help us. They have their own agenda, and we are not allowed to know its full
parameters. . . . The focus of the abduction is the production of children." 2

Early in his book Jacobs reviewed what is probably the most famous ab-
duction case, that of Barney and Betty Hill, whose story, as written by John
Fuller, appeared first in Look magazine in 1966 and later that same year as
the book Interrupted Journey.

Background s

xj a ™t ""I 5 r r ' an T™* 1 C ° Uple; he W3S 3 black memb « °f
NAACP and the New Hampshire Civil Rights Commission; she was a
wh.te soc.al worker. They were solid, respected, devout members of their
community. According to the Hills' story, in 19ft, while driving at night
along a remote stretch of road en route from Montreal to Portsmouth, New
Hampshire, they observed a bright, luminous object in the sky. The object
initially appeared to be stalking them from a distance, but later drew closer
until it was hovering overhead. The Hills heard two beeping sounds, then
saw the disk no more. Upon their return home, they discovered their arrival
was two hours later than it should have been. They could not account for
the passage of missing time.

The Hills remembered having thought they had seen a UFO, but noth-
ing more. During the next several months, however, they were so distressed
by bizarre dreams of being taken aboard an alien spaceship that they sought
psychological counseling. They were referred to UFO skeptic Dr. Benjamin
Simon, a reputable psychiatrist adept in hypnosis.

Under hypnosis, the Hills separately and singly recalled having been ab-
ducted from their automobile by small, hairless, ashen-colored Beings with
large heads and eyes, small noses and mouths. The Beings brought the Hills
inside a stationary UFO, isolated them from each other in individual
rooms, and performed medical examinations upon them. During her ex-
amination, a long needle was inserted into Betty Hill's stomach as part of,
the Beings told her, a "pregnancy test."

A larger Being, whom Betty took to be the "leader," communicated
with her telepathically. At one point the Beings seemed mystified that Betty
Hill's upper teeth could not be removed as Barney Hill's could. Barney wore
an upper denture.

There followed various other "medical procedures" — skin scraping and
the like — and then the Hills were permitted to leave the spacecraft and
watch it depart. After a second series of beeps, their memories of the expe-
rience were erased. Only a vague sense of unease remained.

Since the Hills' abduction hundreds of other abduction cases have been
catalogued and studied, a figure which Dr. Jacobs and others in the field be-
lieve is only a fraction of the number of abductions actually carried out.

As Abduction Study Conference co-chairman John E. Mack wrote in
his introduction to Dr. Jacobs's Secret Life, "The idea that men, women, and
children can be taken against their wills from their homes, cars, and school-
yards by strange, humanoid beings, lifted onto a spacecraft, and subjected
to intrusive and threatening procedures is so terrifying, and yet so shatter-
ing to our notions of what is possible in our universe, that the actuality of
the phenomenon has been largely rejected out of hand or bizarrely distorted

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

in most media accounts. This is altogether understandable, given the dis-
turbing nature of UFO abductions and our prevailing notions of reality.
The fact remains, however," Mack continued,

that for thirty years and possibly longer, thousands of individuals who ap-
pear to be sincere and of sound mind and who are seeking no personal
benefit from their stories have been providing to those who will listen con-
sistent reports of precisely such events. Population surveys suggest that
hundreds of thousands, and possibly more than a million, persons in the
United States alone may be abductees, or "experiencers," as they are some-
times called. The abduction phenomenon is, therefore, of great clinical
importance if for no other reason than the fact that abductees are often
deeply traumatized by their experiences. At the same time the subject is of
obvious scientific interest, however much it may challenge our notions of
reality and truth.

The relevant professional communities in mental health, medicine,
biology, physics, electronics, and other disciplines are understandably
skeptical of a phenomenon as strange as UFO abduction, which defies our
accepted notions of reality. The effort to enable these communities to take
abduction reports seriously will be best served through scrupulously con-
ducted research by investigators who bring a scholarly and dispassionate
yet appropriately caring attitude to their work. In this way patterns and
meanings may be discovered that can lead to fuller and deeper knowledge
and, eventually, to the development of convincing theoretical under-
standing.

"Dr. Jacobs's findings will, I believe," Mack went on to say, "impress
those who are open at least to the possibility that something important is
happening in the lives of these individuals and countless others that cannot
readily be explained by the theories and categories currently available to
modern science. . . ." 3

Jacobs is not new to the UFO field; in 1975 Indiana University Press
published his UFO Controversy in America, with a foreword written by J.
Allen Hynek — like John E. Mack, a gentleman with sterling credentials. A
former professor of astronomy at Ohio State University and later chairman
of the Astronomy Department at Northwestern University, Hynek was
brought in by the United States Air Force in 1949 to be scientific consultant
for its Project Sign, later Project Grudge, and still later Project Blue Book,
the Air Force's effort to gather evidence that UFOs either did or did not
exist. For the next twenty years Hynek served as consultant to the Air Force
on UFOs. During that period Hynek went from being an astronomer who,
prior to his association with the Air Force, had (in his own words) "joined
my scientific colleagues in many a hearty guffaw at the 'psychological post-

Background 7

war craze for flying saucers that seemed to be sweeping the country and at
the naivete and gullibility of our fellow human beings who were being taken
in by such obvious 'nonsense' " 4 to becoming a man who would demand
that the scientific community undertake a "respectable scholarly study of
the UFO phenomenon." 5

In an August 1966 letter to Science magazine, the official organ of the
American Association for the Advancement of Science, Hynek attempted to
refute the most common misconceptions about UFO reports:

1. Only UFO "buffi" report UFO sightings. Almost the exact opposite,
Hynek pointed out, is true. "The most articulate reports come from obvi-
ously intelligent people" 6 who had not previously given UFOs much con-
sideration and were shocked and surprised by their experience. UFO buffs
and "believers" of the cultist variety, Hynek added, rarely make reports, and
when they do, they are "easily categorized by their incoherence." 7

2. UFOs are never reported by scientifically trained people. "On the con-
trary," Hynek wrote, "some of the very best reports have come from scien-
tifically trained people. Unfortunately, such reports are rarely published in
the popular literature since these people usually wish to avoid publicity and
request anonymity." 8

3. No UFO has ever been picked up on radar or by meteor-and-satellite-
tracking cameras. Not so, Hynek reported. These instruments had, indeed,
tracked "oddities" that defied identification, and because of this Hynek was
"unable to dismiss the UFO phenomenon with a shrug." 9

Pointing out that twentieth-century scientists tended to forget that
there would be a "21st-century science, and indeed, a 30th-century science,
from which vantage points our knowledge of the universe may appear quite
different," he concluded that "we suffer, perhaps, from temporal provin-
cialism, a form of arrogance that has always irritated posterity."

In his 1972 landmark book, The UFO Experience: A Scientific Inquiry
Hynek originated the term "Close Encounters," subsequently popularized
by the Steven Spielberg film Close Encounters of the Third Kind. He did so
in order to distinguish between those reports in which a UFO is seen at a
distance and those involving sightings at close range.

The more distant UFO reportings he divided into three categories: Noc-
turnal Lights, those UFOs seen at night; Daylight Discs, those seen in the
daytime (Hynek was cautious to add that he refers to these UFOs as cUscs
because "the prevalent shape reported is oval or disc-like, although it should
be understood the term is rather loosely applied"); and R^r-VhuaL those
reportings made through observations on radar accompanied by visual

sightings. .

Close-range sightings Hynek also broke down into three types:

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

Close Encounters of the First Kind. This category is the simple Close En-
counter in which the reported UFO is seen at close range but there is no
interaction with the environment (other than trauma on the part of the
observer).

Close Encounters of the Second Kind. These are similar to the First Kind ex-
cept that physical effects on both animate and inanimate material are
noted. Vegetation is often reported as having been pressed down, burned,
or scorched. Tree branches are reported broken; animals are frightened,
sometimes to the extent of physically injuring themselves in their fright.
Inanimate objects, most often vehicles, are reported as becoming mo-
mentarily disabled, their engines killed, radios stopped, and headlights
dimmed or extinguished. In such cases, the vehicles reportedly return to
normal after the UFO has left the scene.

Close Encounters of the Third Kind. In these cases the presence of "occu-
pants" in or about the UFO is reported. Here a sharp distinction must be
made between cases involving reports of the presence of presumably in-
telligent beings in the "spacecraft" and the so-called contactee cases. 10

The "contactees" Hynek was referring to were individuals such as
"Professor" George Adamski {Flying Saucers Have Landed, 1953; Inside the
Spaceships, 1956), "Doctor" Daniel Fry (White Sands Incident, 1954), Tru-
man Bethurum (Aboard a Flying Saucer, 1954), Orfeo Angelucci (Secret of
the Saucers, 1955), and Howard Menger (From Outer Space to You, 1959),
each of whom had emerged in the 1950s to peddle accounts of not only
having seen UFOs but also of having been in close contact with their
occupants.

Adamski's 1952 photographs of "scout craft" from a Venusian "mother
ship" bore an uncanny resemblance to chicken brooders readily available
from mail-order catalogues. Prior to his notoriety, Adamski had been a
handyman in a four-stool California cafe'.

Fry had an undisclosed job at New Mexico's White Sands Proving
Ground when an "ovate spheroid" allegedly landed near him and whisked
him to New York City and back in thirty minutes. Fry's saucer's occupants
told him they were the survivors of a great war between Atlantis and
Lemuria, and that they had contacted him instead of someone more highly
placed because it would upset the "ego balance" of the Earth's civilizations
if they were to reveal themselves.

The captain of Bethurum's "space scow" was Aura Rhanes, "queen of
women," whose "smooth skin was a beautiful olive and roses." Aura's planet,
Clarion, Bethurum reported, was in our solar system, but because it was al-
ways on the opposite side of the sun from us, we have never seen it.

Background g

A ^ g fiT^CT"^ mCChaniC ' reC0Umed Seein S a saucer in » ^
Angela field. While mspecting it, he was told by a "space brother" that

harths material advancement" was threatening life's evolution. Angelucci's

subsequent meet.ngs with the aliens took place in a Greyhound bus depot

And Menger, a self-employed sign painter, wrote of having been given
a tour of the Moon's cities and other wondrous sights by his alien hosts, who
subsequently informed him he had been a Jupiterian in a previous life and
had been placed on Earth to do good deeds for mankind.

Not surprisingly, Hynek considered the contactees to be "pseudoreli-
gious fanatics" with "a low credibility value" and dismissed their accounts.
"It is unfortunate, to say the least," Hynek wrote, "that reports such as these
have brought down upon the entire UFO problem the opprobrium and
ridicule of scientists and public alike, keeping alive the popular notion of
'little green men and the fictional atmosphere surrounding that aspect of
the subject.

"The typical Close Encounter of the Third Kind," Hynek emphasized,
"happens to the same sorts of persons who experience all other types of
UFOs, representing the same cross section of the public. The experience
comes upon these reporters just as unexpectedly and surprises them just as
much as it does the reporters of the other types of Close Encounters. These
reporters are in no way 'special.' They are not religious fanatics; they are
more apt to be policemen, businessmen, schoolteachers, and other re-
spectable citizens." 11

The Abduction Study Conference to be held at MIT. would be an ex-
amination of Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind, a category Hynek seem-
ingly had not anticipated. Such a case might be defined as one in which

personal contact between an individual or individuals is initiated by the
"occupants" of the spacecraft. Such contact may involve the transporta-
tion of the individual from his or her terrestrial surroundings into the
spacecraft, where the individual is communicated with and/or subjected
to an examination before being returned. Such a close encounter is usu-
ally of a one-to-two-hour duration.

The second pre-conference reading assignment was "On Stolen Time: A
Summary of a Comparative Study of the UFO Abduction Mystery' by
Thomas E. Bullard, Ph.D. .

In this paper, privately published by the Fund for UFO Research in
1987, Dr. Bullard noted that of the nearly three hundred alien abduction
cases whose locations were known, 132 came from the United States and 50
from the remainder of the English-speaking world. In addition, there were

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

69 cases in Latin America, 28 in continental Europe, and 3 from the Soviet
Union.

Who experiences abductions? "Just about anybody," Bullard reported.
"Abductees come from all walks of life, all levels of education, and all lines
of work, though people whose jobs keep them outside at night run a higher
risk than average. Two-thirds of abductees in this sample are male and one-
third female. Out of 309 cases, 76% are single-witness cases while 49 cases
include two other witnesses and 12 cases three. A remainder of 12 cases in-
volves more than three. . . ." 12

Bullard's most surprising discovery was that "abductions are a peril of
youth. If you once pass 30 without ever being abducted," he wrote, "you
have little to worry about. A periodicity shows up in the age distribution
with peaks at age 7, again at 12-13, 16-17 an< ^ 2 °> lending support to the pos-
sibility that the captors keep tabs on a subject over the years. The range of
abductions is lifelong, from infancy to age 77, but the frequency plunges in
a striking way after 30." 13

Although both the Jacobs book and the Bullard summary were considered
seminal to the meeting at M.I.T., it became apparent as the conference pro-
ceeded that there was considerable disagreement as to both the import and
the meaning of those abductions they describe as having taken place.

CHAPTER I I

At the Conference

Day One

For the Saturday, June 13, 1992, two p.m. opening of the Abduction Study
Conference, John E. Mack wears a dark, loose-fitting suit, a white shirt, and
a conservatively striped tie. He has been sitting sideways in a front-row seat
in the large M.I.T. lecture hall in which the conference is being held, room
6-120. He is scanning the audience as it assembles, waiting until everyone is
settled. I choose a row about two-thirds of the way up the steeply banked
classroom. The cushioned seats fold up and down like in a theater; a small,
comma-shaped writing desk lifts out of the right-hand armrest.

A few moments later, Dr. Mack rises, walks to the front of the room,
and stands looking up at us. There is a triptych of green blackboards behind
him, a heavy table and an overhead projector to his right. He runs his long,
thin fingers through his thick, dark hair and says, "Welcome to this extra-
ordinary event!"

Mack has the stooped posture of a tall, thin academician whose failing
eyesight has left him permanently bent from having spent so much time
straining to decipher his handwritten lecture notes. Mack at first speaks too
fast to allow accurate transcription. I hear him say something about "our
chance to bring together scholars who are working in this field" and some-
thing about distinguishing between "all the dramatic, sensationalist stuff
that flows around and gets merged with this subject." And then, as if he
were really seeing the assembled audience for the first time, he says with sur-
prising emotion, "I just want to acknowledge the heroic, courageous— I
won't quite say 'foolhardy,' but that was the word going through my head-
work of Dave Pritchard in all of this. He has put himself on the line. . . ."
And then there is something about "taking a stand" and moving "science

and human thought along." „
Mack remarks upon the "politics of mindset," the "politics of ontology.
He has a way of answering one question with another: "Does the alien

12 CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

abduction phenomenon require that we create a new scientific paradigm?"
. . . "Do we need only to stretch our minds to conceive of physical and psy-
chological technology of which other species are capable, but that are beyond
our capacities at the present time?" . . . "Is consciousness, and all that con-
sciousness perceives, but itself the play of some divine or cosmic technol-
ogy?" He lets these questions hang in the air and sits down.

If Mack's visage is furrowed and darkened by the anguish of contem-
plating nuclear holocausts, his studies of suicide — real and, for his partic-
ipation in a conference on people who believe they have been abducted by
alien crews from UFOs, perhaps academic — along with the inevitable
wounds and distresses that have surfaced in forty years of psychiatric prac-
tice, his co-chairman Dave Pritchard's boyish features seem as ebullient as
the forces of light upon the atoms he has studied. Pritchard's brow, beneath
its hotel-barbershop cut of gray hair, is unlined. He lopes to the front of
the hall with unbridled enthusiasm electric in his powder-blue slacks and
white short-sleeved shirt, its breast pocket filled dweeb-fashion with dif-
ferent-colored marking pens. His eyes flash behind gold wire-framed
glasses; he strides back and forth behind the desk, explaining how the con-
ference came about, that "in trying to deal with the abduction phenome-
non" he had been frustrated by "the lack of a comprehensive and sane
review." He tells us that at first he had considered writing a book, "but then
I said, 'No, that's no good, what I really want is a critical analysis and an
exploration of all the possibilities, and the best way to get it is by having a
conference with lots of discussion.' " He lifts a commonplace white plastic
kitchen timer from the table beside him and explains how each speaker will
be rigorously limited to the time allotted and that when the timer rings, he
or she must stop. He speaks a little about the funding for the conference
and how "We've tried to keep the crazies out." And then Pritchard pauses
to emphasize that while this is a conference being held at M.I.T. it is not
an M.I. T. conference. It is a distinction Pritchard pointedly made when
I spoke with him fourteen days before. "It's not that M.I.T. endorses
the conference," he had told me at that time, "it's that they endorse the
principle that the faculty should be given enough rope to make fools of
themselves. Many of them," he added with a little laugh, "think I'm doing
just that."

Pritchard did not disguise his nervousness over the exposure he might
get from media attending the conference. "You have to understand my re-
luctance to be thrown into the spotlight here," he had told me, then cor-
rected himself: "I see it more as a swimming pool full of sharks. But I'm
going to have to face this anyway. I mean, you can't keep walking down this
path without at some point it going public."

At the Conference ]3

What he would be "going public" with, however, was still in question.
At the time of our conversation, with only two weeks until the conference
began, ,ts organizers-Pritchard among them-were still "just trying to fig-
ure out what we would agree the characteristics of this phenomenon are -
as he said. Lots of explanations will be considered: the extraterrestrial hy-
pothesis, individual psychoses, various kinds of collective mental phenom-
enon that might be culturally induced in relation to other borderline things,
fantasy-prone individuals, the phenomenon's similarities to the Near-Death
Experience. But as to the actual 'What are the aliens up to?,' we're not sure
a third of us will even think it's aliens by the time we get to that point in the
conference."

Pritchard's co-chairman John Mack, for example, had already aligned
himself in print with those who argued against a simple extraterrestrial expla-
nation for the phenomenon. In his introduction to David Jacobs's Secret Life,
Mack had pointed out, "A literalist extraterrestrial hypothesis must account
for the relative paucity of solid physical evidence— the lack of photographs of
the beings, for example — and the virtually insurmountable problems related
to accounting for the location, origins, and lives of the aliens themselves
within the framework of the physical laws of our space/time universe." 1

Mack's contention was not that the extraterrestrial explanation was
wrong, only that it might not be enough. Right or wrong, however, the ex-
istence of the conference and its assigned reading of Secret Life was a solid
indication that the extraterrestrial hypothesis would not be dismissed.

Following Mack's and his own opening remarks, Pritchard introduces
the conference's first speaker. He is Mark Rodeghier, director of investiga-
tions for the Chicago-based J. Allen Hynek Center for UFO Studies
(CUFOS), the most prominent of the UFO research organizations.
Rodeghier's topic is "A Set of Selection Criteria for Abductees."

Rodeghier has been given three minutes to speak and two minutes to
answer questions. While Pritchard sets the timer, Rodeghier dims the lights
and moves within the shadows cast by the brilliant overhead projector. He
slaps his first transparency onto the glass plate. "In order to qualify as an 'ab-
ductee,' " Rodeghier says, pausing to focus the projectors lense, "a person
must be (a) taken against his or her will, (b) from terrestrial surroundings,
(c) by nonhuman Beings." n

He swiftly replaces his first transparency with a second. "The Beings,
he says, "must take a person to (a) an enclosed place, (b) nonterrestr.al m
appearance, that is (c) assumed or known to be a spacecraft by the w.tness.

Next transparency. "In this place," Rodeghier continues, the person
must either be (a) subjected to a physical examination, (b) engaged ,n com-
munication, verbal or telepathic, or (c) both."

1 4

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

Fourth transparency. "These experiences may be remembered (a) con-
sciously or (b) through methods of focused concentration, such as hypnosis."

There are no questions, and Rodeghier hurries back to his seat. He was
as straightforward and succinct in his presentation as a game umpire estab-
lishing the rules. He has, I realize, in fact done just that: he has spelled out
what an abductee is.

Rodeghier is replaced by the second speaker, Thomas E Bullard, whose
presentation is an update of his now five-year-old "On Stolen Time: A Sum-
mary of a Comparative Study of the UFO Abduction Mystery."

Bullard, whom everyone calls Eddie, is best-known among "ufologists"
as a cataloguer of other investigators' findings and not as an originator of
new abduction material: in other words, he does not go out and find ab-
ductees and investigate their experiences himself. But Bullard is considered
a "heavyweight thinker" by ufologists, and his writings on the folkloric di-
mensions of the UFO phenomenon are rigorously intellectual, scholarly,
amusing, and concise. In addition to being a cataloguer, Eddie Bullard ap-
pears to serve another function as well: he is the movement's amanuensis
and its witness.

Bullard announces that the number of cases he has catalogued since his
1987 summary has now risen to 725; but he is less rigid than Rodeghier
about what should be considered an "abduction." He reports coming across
about 80 cases where individuals have seen luminous or glowing orbs in
their rooms; and he has also recorded what he calls "psychic abductions":
lengthy narratives by people that are "close" to being abductions but are not
exactly physical events. In addition, there are what he calls "voluntary entry"
cases. These, too, pose a problem, since the individuals, in these instances,
apparently welcome visitation, and for that reason, Bullard says, "they shade
into 'contactees' in that they develop a long-term, nonprofit relationship
with the aliens."

There is a slight ripple of disdainful laughter among the audience at
Bullard's mention of "contactees." He smiles in acknowledgment and shares
with us that there are certain cases he has had to dismiss; one such, he says,
was the man who wanted to tell him "about his tour of duty with the Space
Marines."

Following Bullard's presentation there is a thirty-minute coffee break in
the Eastman lobby just outside the lecture hall's lower-level doors. A bronze
bas-relief portrait of George Eastman is affixed to the marble wall; his nose
has been polished to a high gloss by countless student caresses. I take a care-
ful look at my fellow conference attendees. I find myself disappointed by
how normal we appear. I cannot initially tell who among us are the ab-
ductees. But then I notice some of the assemblage are identified on their

At the Conference , 5

nametags only by a fi rst name, presumably for the sake of anonymity. These
individuals, ,t becomes clear, are the abductees.
The speaker after the break is Budd Hopkins.

Hopkins is the dean of the UFO abduction investigators, with about fifteen
hundred cases to his credit. He is the author of Missing Time (1981) and In-
truders: The Incredible Visitations at Copley Woods (1987); Intruders has just
been made into a two-part television miniseries broadcast by CBS the
month before. He is also a talented painter and sculptor whose works are
part of the permanent collections of the Whitney, the Guggenheim, the
Hirshhorn, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Museum of Modern Art.

Hopkins is a tall, gentle, silver-haired man with expressive features; his
topic today is "Acquisition" — how the aliens acquire their abductees. But
before he gets into that, he suggests that UFO abductions may be more
common than UFO sightings and that they are "the most portentous phe-
nomenon science has yet to face" — a pronouncement P. T. Barnum himself
would have been proud to have produced.

"The acquisition most commonly takes place at night when people are
sleeping," Hopkins reports. "The person is first paralyzed — although there
seems to be different degrees of paralysis, people can generally move their
eyes." The vast majority of abductees Hopkins has dealt with are then either
lifted up a beam of light or floated up accompanied by "entities" into the
awaiting spacecraft — a journey that for the most part, it seems to me, goes
astonishingly unnoticed by people outside whom one might otherwise ex-
pect to witness it. Hopkins tells, of an Englishman he interviewed who
spoke of having been floated through closed doors. A woman reported hav-
ing been floated past eleven people at a Cape Cod cocktail party; the guests
were all "frozen" as if in a state of suspended animation.

Three weeks before, Hopkins says, five people were taken from a Man-
hattan apartment: a mother and father, their sixteen-year-old and three-
year-old sons, and their elder son's sixteen-year-old friend. At the time of the
abduction the little boy was sleeping in the main bed with his father, the
mother was on the couch in the living room, and the two teenaged boys
were sharing a bedroom. All five awoke at 4:20 a.m. with simultaneous
nosebleeds. Nosebleeds, we now know from our reading of Jacobs's Secret
Life, are a common symptom of an abduction.

During the question period someone asks Budd Hopkins what red Hags
might indicate an obviously disturbed person. Hopkins tells of the individ-
ual who came to see him with an abduction story and had some of the
details right" but then had added that at night, the aliens had gone .nto

1 6

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

downtown Toronto and rearranged the buildings. "Common sense is a
good indicator of when to stay away from a case," Hopkins concludes.

John Mack rises to point out that among the abductees who have
sought his counseling, none showed a "desire to be perceived as an experi-
encer." (During the course of the conference "experiencer" evolves into the
favored identification for an individual who has endured an abduction.) He
tells of the university administrator who came to him to tell him his ab-
duction story and, as Mack listened, became increasingly distressed. "Why
are you so sad?" Mack asked. "Doctor," the administrator responded, "I had
hoped you would tell me I was crazy. Now I have to deal with the fact that
something real has happened to me, and that scares me! It scares me because
I don't know how to deal with it and I don't know'what this is!"

The next presenter, Tom Benson, a neatly dressed middle-aged UFO re-
searcher from Trenton, New Jersey, spells out the initial sequence of events
directly preceding an abduction based on approximately one hundred cases
over the last forty years in which drawings by the abductees are available.
"Analysis of the details," Benson says, "reveals a pattern comprised of the
following stages. First, the percipient's attention is drawn to a bright light
that may be flashing or pulsing, or hears an unusual sound." The saucer's
"humming," Benson tells us, might serve to focus the individual's attention
upon the UFO. "Is it a tool for gaining access to a person's mind prior to an
abduction?" he asks.

"Second," he continues, "the object is usually noticed in close proxim-
ity. Third, the percipient has a strong urge — or even a communicated com-
mand — to move to another nearby location. Fourth, the object is seen to
land. No entity is observed." Many abductees, the investigator points out,
describe the saucer's color as an "orange-red" and say that its "glowing ef-
fect is both external and internal." Although the size of the lights on the
disc's rim may vary, he says, it is generally agreed that they rotate counter-
clockwise.

"Fifth," he continues, "an entity appears. The craft may either be on the
ground or hovering. Sixth, the percipient is taken on board."

Benson concludes his short presentation stating that "further research is
required to test the hypothesis that a typical UFO close encounter is highly
correlated with abductions — a result that has long been suspected by re-
searchers."

David E. Jacobs, author of Secret Life, is next. He is to discuss what
commonly happens to an abductee once he or she has been brought aboard
the alien craft.

At the Conference

Jacobs is in his early fifties, a pink-cheeked, mustached, portly man in
a carefully tailored charcoal-gray suit. He wears his tightly curled gray hair
in a modified Afro, but he would not be out of place in muttonchops. He
exudes an air of self-confidence which, I later learn, antagonizes some of the
conference members, who read it as self-importance. He has recently com-
pleted a successful tour for Secret Life and has become a recognized UFO au-
thority. But being a historian, he has also developed an academician's fervor
for facts that support his point of view.

In his five years of investigation into abductions, Jacobs tells us, he has
performed more than 325 hypnosis sessions with more than sixty abductees.
Although the abductees for the most part did not know each other, they
told strikingly similar stories containing strikingly similar details. They were
abducted by small (3X to 4X feet tall), thin, strange-looking, grayish-colored
Beings with disproportionately large heads. These Beings floated or led the
abductee to an examining table upon which the individual was laid supine.
The Beings then subjected their victims to a variety of "medical procedures"
before returning them to the place from which they had been taken. The
abductees were powerless to prevent what was happening to them; and the
moment they were returned, they forgot everything, or nearly everything,
that had occurred.

Jacobs reports that while listening to their stories (sometimes recalled
through regressive hypnosis, at other times through conscious memories),
he began to notice how "structured" the abduction scenario seemed to be:
certain procedures were nearly always followed by certain other procedures.
Based on this perceived structure, Jacobs tells us, he devised a "common ab-
duction scenario matrix" consisting of three tiers: "Primary experiences,
which involve procedures that the aliens perform the greatest number of
times on the greatest number of people. Secondary experiences, which occur
less frequently, not during every episode. Among these secondary experi-
ences," Jacobs adds, "might be some procedures that are never performed
on some abductees. The third tier I call ancillary experiences — those involv-
ing specialized sexual procedures or irregular procedures that happen infre-
quently to the abductee population as a whole."

The first tier of primary experiences, Jacobs explains, establish the frame-
work for all those procedures that follow. These procedures begin once the in-
dividual has been taken aboard the spacecraft and laid out on a table seemingly
designed specifically for the examination of human beings. Abductees, Jacobs
notes, consistendy described the table as roughly rectangular, unipodal, long
enough to hold an adult-sized human. The lower third of the table might also
be opened into a Y and slanted. Sometimes a light-scanning instrument is at-
tached to the table, or perhaps a device for the collection of sperm.

18 CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

The first stage of the primary experience is the physical examination, Ja-
cobs explains. Abductees describe the small Beings as "probing, poking, feel-
ing, flexing" their bodies. Part of the exam seems to commonly consist of
pressing upon a prone abductee's vertebrae one by one from the top of the
spine to the coccyx. At other times, the Beings' fingers dance over their cap-
tives. One of Jacobs's female abductees said it felt as though someone were
"playing a piano" upon her body. Another felt they were "typewriting" on her.

Tissue samples, Jacobs reports, are generally taken during the physical
examination, frequently from behind the knee. This is followed by the in-
sertion or removal of an implant. Abductees, he tells us, report having had
a narrow instrument with a tiny, round, seemingly metallic ball at its end
pushed far up their noses. They would hear a crunching sound, the instru-
ment would be withdrawn, and the ball would be missing.

"The object is as small as or smaller than a BB," Jacobs had written in
Secret Life:

and it is usually smooth, or has small spikes sticking out of it or has holes
in it. The function of this device is unknown: It might be a locator so that
the targeted individual can be found and abducted; it might serve as a
monitor of hormonal changes; it might facilitate the molecular changes
needed for transport and entrance. . . . Sometimes nosebleeds occur after
this procedure. Both child and adult abductees have seen physicians for
nosebleed problems, and have discovered odd holes inside their noses. 2

Alternate implant locations, Jacobs tells us at the conference, are the
legs, arms, and genitals, but the most common sites are the sinuses, tear
ducts, and ears.

After the physical examination, the small, gray Beings step aside and are
replaced by a Tall Being, who might be anywhere from a few inches to a full
head taller than the Small Beings.

Whereas the Small Beings' skin is reported to be soft, poreless, with a
rubbery or plastic feel to it, the Tall Beings' skin is rougher, more leathery.
Neither type of Being has hair, musculature, skeletal structure, or any dis-
tinguishing marks such as warts, moles, or discolorations. For the most part,
abductees describe the aliens' skin colors in varying shades of gray, from a
dark gray to chalk white; if an abductee reports a different color (brown,
purple, yellow, orange, blue, and green have all been mentioned), that color
will most often be linked with gray: grayish blue, charcoal brown, etc.

Jacobs's abductees describe the Tall Being as having an air of authority;
they often refer to the Tall Being as "the Doctor." Although the Small Be-
ings can and do act independently of the Tall Beings, when the Tall Beings
give the Small Beings an order, the Small Beings carry it out.

At the Conference

After the physical-examination segment of the primary experience has
been completed, the taller Being commences the mental phase. "Mindscan
is the focus of his attention," Jacobs says. "Nose-to-nose staring takes place."

During Mindscan, the abductee is still on the table; the Being bends
over him or her, comes so close their foreheads might touch. The Being then
looks deeply, penetratingly into the abductee's eyes. "The abductee may ex-
perience feelings of love, trust, calm, fear, dread," Jacobs says. Abductees
commonly sense some sort of information is being extracted from their
minds. What sort of information, and what is done with it, Jacobs doesn't
profess to know. "It may be some sort of bonding procedure that is taking
place."

During the next stage, the Tall Being might sexually arouse the ab-
ductee. "Sexual arousal is delicate to discuss," Jacobs tells us, "but pro-
foundly important to understand." He points out that from "time to time
the aliens will induce rapid, intense sexual arousal and even orgasm in a
woman as part of their Mindscan procedures. Abductees typically com-
plain, 'I hate it when they do this.' " The women feel violated, raped, angry
that such a thing was done to them against their will.
. When Mindscan is completed, or sexual arousal is at its peak, Jacobs
continues, "the Tall Being immediately commences a set of gynecological
procedures designed to collect and implant eggs, or urological procedures to
remove sperm. Women feel that something is put in them. They are told,
'Now you are pregnant.' They wake up the next morning and feel pregnant.
They test positive for pregnancy. It doesn't make any sense. Usually, they are
abducted again and are told, 'We're taking it out now' or 'It's time now.'
They feel that something is being removed from them, that they are no
longer pregnant," Jacobs reports. "There is very strong anecdotal evidence
to support this."

Jacobs steps down and is replaced by Yvonne Smith, an attractive hyp-
notherapist from La Crescenta, California. She has had two cases, she re-
ports, involving a female and a male abductee. The female, a housewife,
described a drilling sensation in the back of her head and felt her skull being
opened up. She smelled a burning odor, and then her head was resealed.
During the procedure she was aware of a pressure on the top of her skull, as
if her head was strapped down with a band across her brow. She described a
needle and a laser beam having been used inside her ear. In addition she felt
a discomfort, some sort of pressure in her left eye. She could not see anything
while the examination was going on because her face was half-covered.

The male, Smith tells us, is a member of the Los Angeles Police De-
partment. He became extremely agitated describing an incision made in the
back of his head.

20 CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

Someone asks if, after alien physical examinations, there are any indi-
cations of healing. Smith replies, "I have an HIV-positive abductee who
now tests negative."

Tests negative? Is she telling us the aliens have a cure for AIDS? Curi-
ously, there is no follow-up question.

Jenny Randies, director of investigations for the British UFO Research
Association, is up next. She has written fifteen books on UFO-related sub-
jects. She is small, stocky, indomitable; there is something of the Miss Marple
British character actress amateur detective in her stance and delivery.

Randies announces she has studied twenty-six cases documented at the
end of the 1960s and during the 1970s in Great Britain — "eighteen achieved
without hypnosis, eight with," she reports. "In 60 percent of the cases," she
tells us, "the entities did offer some sort of explanation: they were 'con-
ducting long-term surveillance of our planet'; they were 'making repeated
visits'; they were 'collecting life profiles'; there was 'some sort of emergency
coming.' " In the 1980s, Randies continues, abductees reported a building
toward some sort of cosmic ecology; they were being told, "You are special.
You will be called on at some future time."

Exposure to popular UFO lore in Britain is limited, she states, and con-
fined largely to Whitley Strieber's autobiographical Communion and the
movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

Randies concludes her short presentation saying, "Medical examina-
tions during the 1960s were rare." She also reports that, "In Britain the smell
of cinnamon is associated with the entities." (In this country, I later learn,
the odors are ammonia, sulphur, lemons, and almonds.)

Randies steps down and David Jacobs returns. His presentation is a
continuation of his abduction-scenario matrix taken from his book Secret
Life. Having covered the primary experiences, he now discusses the next
stage, the secondary procedures.

"After the abductee has undergone the physical, mental, and reproduc-
tive procedures," Jacobs says, "he or she is often subjected to a number of
secondary procedures which involve mental examinations — imaging, envi-
sioning, staging, testing — presumably designed to measure psychological
reactions to prearranged scenes and situations."

During imaging, Jacobs explains, the Beings bring the abductee into a
room separate from the examining room. There he or she is shown images
on a screenlike apparatus. The images may be scenes of nuclear holocaust,
environmental disaster, familial trauma; or they may be sexually charged,
romantic, pleasing. While the abductee is viewing the scenes, the Tall
Being stands to one side staring deeply into the person's eyes. "The focus
of the aliens during the imaging," Jacobs reports, "is not the images but the

At the Conference

emotions those images evoke. The scenes themselves do not have any
prophetic value."

In envisioning, scenes take place not on a screen but in the viewer's
mind, often while he or she is still on the examining table. The scene might
involve a close friend whom the abductee is made to believe is present in the
spacecraft with them. The abductee's interaction with the friend is closely-
studied. The "friend," however, is really a Small Being who has been made
to seem like the friend in the abductee's mind.

Staging is a combination of envisioning and alien "playacting." Jacobs
recounts the story of the female abductee who was made to believe that be-
hind the "closed door of the office" her husband's boss was seated at his
desk. She also was made to believe that the employer had just severely and
unfairly chastised her husband. As a result, she burst into the boss's office
and angrily berated him. Once she began to calm, the image of her hus-
band's employer shimmered and disappeared. In his place were a group of
Small Beings and a Tall Being observing her closely.

Occasionally an abductee is subjected to testing; he or she is given a task
to perform and is observed carrying it out. Jacobs mentions an abductee
who was placed in front of an instrument panel and told to keep some sort
of needle centered between two moving red lines. In this, as in the other
mental procedures, the aliens seemed interested only in studying the ab-
ductee's emotional response.

"After these secondary procedures involving mental examinations,"
Jacobs says, "the abductee may be walked into a special room where he or
she sees scores of fetuses in the process of incubation." The fetuses may be
floating upright in a liquid solution within glassy containers, or they may
be horizontal "in either dry or liquid environments," Jacobs tells us.
"Some abductees have reported seeing as many as one hundred fetuses
gestating in this room. Others see toddlers, youths, adolescents. All seem
to be hybrids, crossbreeds. We do not see 'young' Beings. When we see
young adults or adolescents," Jacobs continues, "they are helping the
Beings in these procedures and they look human, but they have no eye-
brows."

An abductee rises to relate having seen one of the "nurse" Beings rub-
bing what looked like apple butter on a hybrid infant's chest; then a light
came on above the child. Worried, the abductee had asked, "What are you
going to do — bake him?"

"No," the abductee reports being told. "It helps him digest."

During the questioning period one West Coast therapist asks with a
trace of exasperation, "Dave, is it always this consistent?" Jacobs replies that
with abductions and UFOs everything is a matter of patterns.

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

Another therapist states that he has seen three dozen abductees and
does not think Jacobs's scenario is the norm of his experience. Marilyn
Teare, a California therapist with silver hair and a youthful face, adds to
the debate that has just now seemingly surfaced between those who accept
the somewhat rigid Jacobs/Hopkins/Bullard abduction-pattern scenario
and those who don't. "I see a tremendous variance among my patients,"
she reports. "We must be careful to understand that things are not what
they seem."

Someone else adds, "What is the purpose of this? We don't know what
the ultimate purpose is. All our abductees ask, 'Why are they doing this?'
The answer is we have no solid knowledge of why."

The conference breaks for dinner. We have been given a group rate at the
Sail Loft and spill out of the lecture hall onto the M.I.T campus, now awash
in the late-afternoon sun. At the restaurant I seat myself to the right of a
young Massachusetts couple who are abductees. They have a notebook
filled with drawings they have made of the half-dozen different types of
aliens they have encountered.

"Do these aliens have names?" I ask the wife.

"Generally, we refer to them' either by their names, or by a nickname,
because their language is such that we couldn't pronounce their real names,"
she says. "So we have agreed on nicknames or the names other human be-
ings have already given them, and they tell me what that name is."

"Do you have any examples?"

"Do you remember Whitley Strieber, who wrote Communion?" she
asks. "Well, we met his alien, the blue one. And the white one. Did you see
that movie?"

"I'm sorry," I say, "which movie was that? Intruders was the only ab-
ductee movie I've seen."

She looks down at her plate pensively. "I don't think we've met any from
that movie. But we're in the process of meeting an organized group of
worlds that work together. And some of their names are their real names and
some of them are titles. The first one we met is the head of the project, and
we call him Zar."

"Zar?" I ask.

She spells it out for me, then explains, "That's the name he gave us to
call him. I don't know if that's a proper name or if that's his title, but that's
what everybody calls him. And the second one we met was the blue one, the
same one from Communion. We just called him The Blue."

"How did you know he was the same one from Communion?" I ask.

At the Conference

"We thought he was right away," she says. "But later we were told that
he was."

"Who told you?"
"Zar did, I think."

"And did you just call him 'Blue'? Or was he 'The Blue'?"

"When we met him we were just saying 'The Blue One' to differentiate
between who we were talking about as opposed to Zar. We didn't really
think they had names, so we just called the white one 'The White One' or
'The White.' But when we met the next one we found out that he did have
a name and we went back and wanted to know what to call The Blue. He
said 'The Blue' as a proper name was okay, he was happy with that, and that
it was fine to call him that."

"And when you talk to the white one, what do you call him?"

"The White," she says matter-of-factly.

" 'The White,' " I say, an inadvertent bubble of laughter escaping my

lips.

"Those aren't their real names," she adds. "And they aren't titles, either.
They're just sort of reference names."
"What are some of the others?"

"There are a lot of others. I don't feel comfortable just rattling off names,
because they're personalities. These Beings are important to us. We are deal-
ing with an organization. The difference between what we've found so far
and what we've found with other people is that we are aware of dealing with
an organization of worlds — not unlike our own UN, where people from dif-
ferent countries work together and try to get along together. The aliens out
there have been doing it much longer and are much better at it."

"Is this the 'project' you mentioned earlier?"

"Yes, it is. And Zar, like I said, is the head of the project. And then we
systematically started to meet other alien Beings. And we found that some
of the ones we were meeting were members of a council. They sit on a coun-
cil not unlike a school board. Everything that goes on in the project goes
through the Council. It's very organized and very diligent."

"Is the Council all different types of aliens?"

"We've met many different types. We've also seen others who look just
like them on their ships, their crews and their families."
"Who's got the haddock?" a waitress asks.

While we are eating, the woman tells me about the afternoon her hus-
band saw a bright light emanating from within their garage. "That was the
first experience," she says. "He was by himself. It wasn't until a couple of
weeks later that somebody else saw that very, very bright light with him.
There was a doorway cut out of the air — there was no door frame, just a

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

doorway shape — and behind it, through it, he could see that there was a
room within that bright light. And that room, he later found out, was ac-
tually a room on a ship — which is just a science and techn ology above what
we commonly know."

She tells me their four children, ranging in age from three to fifteen,
have "open relationships" with the aliens. "They're all experiences," she
says. "The two girls are not as aware of it as the boys are, because the boys
are older, and because we only became aware of this while the boys were
young. So the girls remember a little of it, but it's important that they can
still do their day-to-day lives without being overly interfered with."

"How many experiences have you had?" I ask her.

"We have daily contact. It started when we were children," she says.
'Two years ago we first became aware of it. And looking back on our lives,
we realized it had been happening our whole lives and we just didn't realize
what it was. That's what happens to most people," she adds. "Two years ago
we realized we were meeting with an organization of thirty worlds. And that
organization is growing. I don't know how many it is now."

"Do you and your husband sit on the Council, or are you just there as
visitors?"

"No. The Council is made up of physical Beings. There are Beings of
light, too, but every Being on the Council has to be physical. They're from
different worlds, and none of them are human. There's nine of them. And
we've met about fifteen different worlds."

"Any idea where these worlds are?"

"I have an idea where one of them is," she says. "Zar said that when he
was a ball of energy — he doesn't have a physical body; in his raw form he's
energy — he said he could travel at greater-than-light speeds by himself
without a ship and reach his star in eleven days. He lives not on a planet but
a star. That sounds really far out, I know, but you should hear some of the
other stuff!"

"That" and "the other stuff" is what I've come to the conference to hear.

After dinner, I take the long way back to the M.I.T. campus. At the Presi-
dent's House, on the corner of Ames Street and Memorial Drive, I turn
right, past the tennis courts and the library, so that I can stroll along the
Cambridge side of the Charles. I turn right again, away from where the
Harvard Bridge spans the river, past the Henry L. Pierce Engineering Lab-
oratory and the Pratt School of Naval Architecture, then climb the marble
steps and pass between the double row of marble columns and through the

At the Conference

doors of 77 Massachusetts Avenue, the main entrance to the long corridor
that connects the Rogers, Homberg, and Macleurin buildings to the East-
man Laboratories, in which our lecture hall is situated.

I walk past deans' offices and a door lettered in goldleaf dept. of alco-
hol distribution, ottus van stubble, his shade discreetly drawn. I pause
at a huge framed tribute to Norbert Weiner, who graduated from high
school at eleven, cum laude from Tufts at fourteen, and was a mathemati-
cian and philosopher on the M.I.T. faculty for forty-five years. Finally I
reach the end of the corridor and turn right to the marble Eastman lobby
with its bronze bas-reliefs of Huygens, Newton, Rumford, Fresnel, and
Galileo on one wall, and on the opposite, Voyle, Lavoisier, Wohler, Jabir,
Ko Hung, Zosimos, Cannizzaro, and Mendeleyev.

I had taken this walk because it seemed important to me to remind my-
self I was in the center of one of America's great scientific universities. I had
come to M.I.T. determined to be objective, open-minded; but during din-
ner I had had to fight the steadily growing conviction that my abductee din-
ner companion was crazy as a loon. As I joined the others milling about the
lobby before the lecture hall's doors, I steeled myself to remain nonjudg-
mental. Zar, I told myself, would want that.

The first speaker after dinner is one of the up-and-coming hypnotherapists
in the abduction field: John S. Carpenter, a thin, balding, thirty- seven-year-
old Menninger Clinic-trained, licensed clinical social worker working in
Springfield, Missouri, where he provides individual, marital, family, and
group therapy for hospitalized psychiatric patients.

Carpenter interests me. Unlike some of the other investigator/therapists
attending the conference, he seems not to have any specific agenda. He sim-
ply reports what he has seen without attempting to evaluate or interpret its
significance. I subsequently learn that Carpenter has worked closely with a
number of other psychiatrists in trying to treat a host of psychiatric mal-
adies, including Multiple Personalities and other dissociative disorders, and
through hypnotism has achieved many positive and lasting changes.

Carpenter had only a passing interest in the UFO phenomenon until
he read of psychiatric professionals who were employing hypnosis to un-
lock the memories masked by the amnesia so commonly encountered in
individuals who had reluctantly come forward to report having observed
a UFO. Carpenter, like John E. Mack, had become "intrigued" that these
individuals' stories seemed "remarkably alike from persons so vastly dif-
ferent in their backgrounds." In 1988 Carpenter volunteered his psychi-

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

atric experience and hypnotic skills in the service of investigating these
UFO reports.

"Although I thought I might manage to participate in at least one in-
teresting case," Carpenter later wrote,

I fully expected to have to wade through a variety of psychological issues
first — including fantasies of hysterical individuals, dramatic confabula-
tions from Borderline Personality Disorders, dissociative episodes as with
Multiple Personalities, attention-seeking antics of sociopathic characters,
intricately-woven psychodynamics of those traumatized in childhood,
and the space-age delusions of insecure individuals, influenced by ex-
traterrestrial themes and speculations in all of the media.

But "to my astonishment," Carpenter admitted, "none of these expec-
tations has become valid in my research so far." Carpenter had interviewed
schoolteachers, policemen, businessmen, college professors, and commu-
nity leaders who claimed to have had abduction experiences, and, as he
wrote, he had "found no psychopathology which would even begin to ex-
plain these reports." 3

In his presentation to those of us gathered after dinner back in the huge
M.I.T. lecture hall, Carpenter, wearing a short-sleeved shirt and tie but no
jacket, delivers a brief report on a case of his, that of "Eddie," a twenty-year-
old male abductee who, while already in therapy with Carpenter to explore
his past abduction experiences, had an additional abduction encounter. In
the course of that abduction Eddie's color blindness was allegedly cured by
the aliens.

"During a physical examination by the Beings, Eddie's right eye was re-
moved. He felt it pulled out and replaced," Carpenter reports. "Afterwards
there was a redness, a physical soreness. He did not feel they were implant-
ing anything behind his eye, only that they were 'fixing' him. The side ben-
efit of this operation appears to be enhanced colors. The procedure was
clearly for their purposes, not for Eddie's, but the partial accidental cure of
his lifelong color blindness was a side effect." Carpenter is in possession of
a statement from Eddie's doctor attesting to his having had "a green lack and
now having a blue-yellow." What was "profound color blindness," Carpen-
ter relates, "had improved up to green color blindness." He returns to his
seat.

Like Yvonne Smith, the California hypnotherapist who earlier had re-
ported an HIV-positive abductee who now tested negative, Carpenter, too,
seems to have come across a miraculous cure.

At the Conference

Eddie Bullard, the cataloguer of UFO lore, steps to the podium again to re-
port on "The Rarer Abduction Episodes" — those in which conferences,
tours of the spacecraft, worldly and otherworldly journeys, or theophanies
occur before the abductee is returned.

Although the Beings seem "uptight, businesslike during the exams,"
Bullard says, "they are more relaxed afterwards." During these postexami-
nation conferences, Bullard reports, the aliens are "all talk (telepathic) and
no action. Beings ask the abductee a question, then let the abductee ask one,
although their questions are rarely answered. Or the Beings give peculiar re-
sponses and tell everybody a different story. "For example," Bullard contin-
ues, "to the abductees' question 'Where do you come from?' the Beings have
answered, A small galaxy near Neptune,' A hundred and sixty-three million
miles away,' or 'We come from a small planet of no particular significance.'
To the question 'What are you doing here?' they say, 'We're to bring back
data on human emotion.' Sometimes they give warnings or prophecies
about the future of the Earth — "but," Bullard emphasizes, "none of these
prophecies have ever come truef

Another rare episode might include a journey. "Sometimes witnesses re-
port being carried to another place," Bullard states. "This other world is ei-
ther dark, dim, with an occupied city lit by a red sun, or it is a desolate,
subterranean, self-contained environment. These journeys take place in an
instant: gone post-breakfast, back before dinner." Bullard pauses, then asks,
"What are we dealing with? Alternate realities? Universes around the coun-
try? Could these be 'staging' or 'imaging' procedures? Sometimes, in tact
often, the aliens give false and misleading information. Or it's a complete fan-
tasy. Or the abductees understand wrong. The misinformation may be due
to the fact that messages are transmitted telepathically and not verbally."

Bullard is questioned about his "well-ordered abductions": "Do you and
Dave Jacobs have the same scheme? Or is it a different scheme?"

"Examination, capture, return seem parallel in widespread episodes,"
Bullard replies. "Certainly the same things seem to be going on, but we may
not have them necessarily in the same order. There are two distinct differ-
ences. The Mindscan and Staring procedures — Dave Jacobs had it; I failed
to recognize it. The baby presentation," he continues, "aliens curled up
asleep in bottles — I found that less prevalent than Dave did. And I know of
only a few reported cases where children were seen running around the ship."

Jacobs steps again to the front of the lecture hall. In recognition of this
being his third and final appearance as a presenter at the conference, he
opens by joking, "Well, after this talk you won't have Dave Jacobs to kick
around anymore."

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

His talk is on the physical description of the aliens. According to Jacobs
the vast majority of the descriptions of the aliens by abductees are consis-
tent with one another — the most common type being what has come to be
called at this conference the "Small Grays."

A Small Gray is 3# to feet tall, with an overly large head, its bulging cra-
nium tapering down to a pointed or near-nonexistent chin. Small Grays are
smooth featured, although some seem to have a "furrowed brow." They have
no hair on their heads or their bodies, leathery skin, no ears (which, Jacobs
adds, is "consistent with telepathy"), a slightly raised ridge of a nose with two
nostrils, and a lipless slit-mouth that does not move. "The most striking fea-
ture," Jacobs says, "are the two large black eyes they are enormous and com-
pelling." They do not blink, or seem to move in their sockets. These eyes come
in various shapes, but most common are the large, almond-shaped, pupil-less,
cornea-less, iris-less, wet-looking, all-black, wrap-around eyes which a few
abductees think might actually be a covering for an eye within — like goggles.

The aliens' bodies are flat, paunchless. Their chests are not bifurcated;
they have no nipples. Nor does the chest swell or diminish with breath-
ing. "Even with the nose-to-nose Mindscan," Jacobs says, "no one has felt
any breath on his or her face, and they do not seem to be air-breathing
Beings."

The lower part of their anatomy does not contain any stomach pouch
or genitals; it just comes to an end. "We don't know how they reproduce,"
Jacobs comments. "They have no hips. There is no triangulation to the
body as there is with humans. Instead, it seems to form just a straight line
down all the way to the ground."

The Small Gray's body appears frail, with thin limbs and no muscula-
ture or bone structure. There are no "knees" or "elbows" as such, and legs
are the same diameter from the top of the thigh to the bottom of the calf.
Nor are there clearly defined "ankles" or "wrists." "Small Grays have three
or four long, thin fingers with pads at the ends," Jacobs tells us. "Frequently
abductees report seeing only three fingers; and if there is an opposable
thumb it is not immediately apparent."

From the back the Beings have "no buttocks, no bifurcation," Jacobs
continues, "just a ridge that marks the end of the trunk. Males and females
look alike; but abductees seem to sense who the females are because they are
more gentle and graceful."

Abductees see no eating quarters, sleeping quarters, no evidence of food
or drink aboard the crafts. "What do we make of this?" Jacobs asks, then an-
swers, "A humanlike figure which under its skin is very, very different. They
do not appear to breathe or ingest food or water."

At the Conference

Someone from the audience remarks, "Everything you have described
sounds more like machinery than biology." Another adds, "Maybe that lit-
tle horizontal ridge on their bottoms is where they change the batteries."
His comment is greeted with punchy laughter; it is nearly ten p.m.

"Are the larger aliens the intelligence behind it?" someone asks. "Could
the Small Grays be robots?"

"Both Beings seem able to make decisions and do," Jacobs replies.
"They both deal with crises. They both act like sentient Beings that are, per-
haps, biologically based."

The next speaker is Joe Nyman, a Boston-area hypnotherapist, whose
topic is "The Familiar Entity and Dual Reference."

The "familiar entity" is a reasonable enough concept — that is, if one is
able to accept that anything said so far at this conference is not totally off-
the-wall. Abductees, Nyman suggests, see the same Being again and again.
Zar, for example, would presumably be my earlier dining companion's fa-
miliar entity. But the "dual reference" premise is startling.

" 'Dual reference,' " Nyman explains, "is a term that has been coined to
describe unexpected imagery articulated by experiencers in latent-encounter
investigations." He is referring to images that the experiencer has of himself
or herself as being "of the same form and kind as those conducting the en-
counter."

Is Nyman telling us that the abductee, too, is an alien — or may have
been one in a previous life or lives?

"The abductee," Nyman says, "tends to see him- or herself engaged in
long-term experiences."

Before reading from a May 1989 hypnotic-regression session tran-
script of a case of a young man who recalls being watched in the woods as
a child by aliens, Nyman discloses that the young man thought he was one
of them. " 'They're looking at me from behind the trees,' " Nyman reads.
" 'They are watching me. I see their faces. I think they want me to
come. . . . They touch me! . . . Maybe it's all in my mind. They've got me!
They're all touching me!'

"I ask him, "Where do you go?' " Nyman says.

" 'Into a sphere of light! It's all white!' "

Nyman mentions another of his subjects, who recalls being in his crib
looking through its bars. A tall figure was leaning over looking at him. "Two
aliens are holding this jar," the witness told Nyman. "It has a light in it and
I am the light!"

I am mystified. Is Nyman saying that to be an alien is to be some form
of light?

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

During the question period one of the therapists attending the confer-
ence accuses Nyman of "leading" his patients during hypnosis. "Are you a
psychologist, Joe?" the therapist asks him.

"No, I'm an engineer," Nyman responds.

The young thirty-something-ish woman on my left wears only her first
name, "Mary," on her nametag. She whispers to me that she was one of
Nyman's abductees and went back into hypnotic regression with him. What
she saw, she said, she wasn't willing to tell him — not until she felt safe.

"What did you see?" I ask.

Mary shakes her head. She certainly won't tell me, either.
John Carpenter returns to the podium. According to the program he
will speak on "Other Types of Aliens."

"Although the gray aliens may be the most commonly reported and/or dis-
cussed variety of extraterrestrial entity," Carpenter says, "there may be other
types worth mentioning. There is a growing consistent pattern of data in re-
gard to what some refer to as the 'Tall Blond' or 'Nordic type.' He is six to
seven feet tall, handsome, with blond shoulder-length hair. His blue eyes are
kind and loving. He is paternal, watchful, smiling, affectionate, youthful,
all-knowing, and wears a form-fitting uniform. This Robert Redford/Scan-
dinavian type," he says, smiling, "is like a guardian angel. They have been
seen on board with the Small Grays.

"In addition to the Grays and the Scandinavian type, there is a third
type," Carpenter continues, "a smooth, lizard-skinned, reptilian, six-to-
eight-foot-tall creature with a somewhat dinosaurish face. It has a four-
clawed hand with brown webbing between the fingers. This reptile type has
catlike eyes with gold, slit pupils. This Being is sinister and deceptive in
manner, half human and half reptile."

Carpenter points out that although both the Reptilian and Nordic types
could arguably be psychodynamic in origin, the slowly emerging pattern of
data does not support this interpretation as yet.

He asks the audience how many have heard of, or seen, the tall, blond
type. Hands shoot up all over the lecture hall.

"Who has heard of, or seen, the Reptilians?" he asks. About half as
many hands are raised.

During the questioning period Jenny Randies reports that the
"guardian-angel types are popular in Britain."

A therapist says she has a six-year-old subject who has seen reptiles for
years.

At the Conference

And an abductee rises to report that a six-foot Nordic type tried on her
high-heeled shoes.

Her comment undoes me! What possible reason could the woman have to
make up an incident like that?

My response to this detail of the high-heeled shoes is the same as the re-
action I had to the incident in the Barney and Betty Hill story where, be-
cause of Barney's false upper plate, the aliens had pulled on his wife's teeth.
Neither of these details strikes me as the sort one could expect a victim to
have fabricated.

Eddie Bullard replaces Carpenter at the front of the lecture hall to con-
tinue with an even greater "Variety of Abduction Beings."

"Out of the 203 cases in which beings are described," he says, "137 are
humanoid, 52 human, and 14 nonhuman." Most humanoids, he continues,
are the familiar kind: "tall, blond Nordic types working with the most com-
mon Small Grays, but some are mummy types, Michelin-man types. Oth-
ers are hairy dwarfs, or trolls."

Abductees, he says, describe the gray alien faces as looking like those of
grasshoppers and praying mantises. The Nordics have "vivid blue eyes,"
Bullard reports, and adds, "They all seem to look alike!" Clones?

He makes the interesting point that among those Beings seen by ab-
ductees, "genuine monsters are scarce and concentrated in the less reliable
cases. If Hollywood is responsible for these images," Bullard asks, "whereare
the monsters? Where are the robots?"

Mary, seated next to me, nods and says, " Yes! "

Martha Monroe, from nearby Framingham, next shows slides of
"New Types of Aliens." Her presentation strikes me as patently ridiculous.
Her first slide depicts what she calls a "Spock type" after Leonard Nimoy's
Star Trek character. The Spock figure in the slide, she says, is a self-portrait
drawn by a Dual Referencer who believes he was an alien. "There is a
'Court Jester,' " she says, throwing up the next slide, a Being with a heart-
shaped head. Someone else, she tells us, had a "familiar entity with a head
shaped like a football," then adds, "Eared entities also function telepath-
ically." Next slide: "This is a Cloaked Being," she reports. "Cloaks and
capes come up quite a lot. . . . The hooded entity seems to be an author-
ity figure."

During the question period someone rises to report that in France there
have been "fifty-four instances of a silver-suited variety seen."

Someone else rises to take issue with Jacobs, whose aliens seem confined
largely to Small Grays and Taller Beings and who has imposed "too narrow
a restriction on the type of information. There are growing, evolving energy

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

types." Conference co-chairman John Mack agrees. He points out that "rig-
orous scientific evaluation at this point is impossible. Do not screen out any
possibilities," he insists.

The Saturday session ends at 10:30 p.m. I scoop up my notes and head out
into the night. A cool breeze is blowing down the Charles River as I start
across Harvard Bridge to my hotel on the Boston side.

As I cross the bridge, downtown Boston, to my left, is alight; to my
right the brilliant, bubbling lights of the Citgo sign brighten the western
nighttime sky. I walk aware of my ambivalence about the conference.
Maybe it's fatigue, but I feel that my open mind is beginning to close and
that the first seeds of disappointment have been sown.

Is it because of my resistance to quasi-scientific efforts to present a topic
that seems to defy reason? I am naturally suspicious of men who use num-
bers to shore up irrational conclusions. When Eddie Bullard begins to cat-
alogue the numbers of alien types and abduction reports — rare or
otherwise — I am reminded of Nixon's speeches as President to justify the in-
vasion of Cambodia and Laos.

I am leery, too, of Dave Jacobs's attempts to impose a historian's order
on what, to me, appears utterly chaotic: the abductees' efforts to come to
grips with what they believe has happened to them. And John Mack hasn't
impressed me much, either. So far, his most telling comment has been "If
this isn't happening, what is happening?"

So it isn't the scientists, the historians, the intellects, the researchers who
interest me — not yet. It is the abductees. There is my dinner companion
and her familiar entity, Zar. There is Mary from the conference, whose
sharp exhalations and groans at Nyman's doubters are indications of how
emotionally she is involved. There are a couple of male abductees I hope to
talk to at some later point.

But the most interesting are two women from Maryland, Alice and
Carol. During the coffee break I had sat on a stone bench outside the East-
man lobby with them while they smoked. I introduced myself and saw
them freeze at learning I was "media." They were both clearly scared to
death — not by me, I am quite sure, but by what they were learning at the
conference.

Their terror was heartfelt, real, and so palpable and raw I am concerned
for their emotional well-being.

CHAPTER III

At the Conference

Day Two

I am sitting alone at a small table in my Boston hotel having breakfast when
Dave Jacobs enters the dining room and sits with me. We are then joined
by Robert Bigelow, the Las Vegas entrepreneur who is one of the financial
backers of this conference.

Budd Hopkins, Jacobs tells me, has investigated about 1,500 cases; he
himself has studied about 350; John Carpenter and John Mack have studied
approximately 50 cases each.

"The numbers are very important," Jacobs stresses, then adds ruefully,
"But if you study this phenomenon, your reward is ridicule from your col-
leagues." He hesitates for a moment, as if in acknowledgment of the risk,
then reconsiders his appraisal. "No," he says, "it's the reward of discovery,
and the thought that you are doing something important — in a therapeu-
tic sense. People who come to me feel relieved. When a person walks into
my office, it may involve four to five hours. By the time it ends, I'm fairly
certain of what they think happened to them. Some abductees go into a
New Age group or channeling. It's a normal psychological dissociative state.
For some of them that makes sense. Channeling is almost always happy. It
lends the feeling that one is part of a grand philosophical design. But Budd
Hopkins, John Mack, and myself are the end of the line. Those who have
proper analysis," he says, "think the abductions are a catastrophic, disastrous
relationship for them."

I ask Bigelow what he thinks is happening. He responds matter-of-
factly, "Either it's a new psychiatric phenomenon, or it's true." It is the an-
swer of a man who has spent his life studying the odds.

Budd Hopkins enters the dining room and joins us, too. While we are
finishing our coffee Hopkins tells an astonishing story about a woman who
was lifted from her bed at 3:15 in the morning and floated out of her twelfth-
story Manhattan apartment building's closed living-room window into a

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

hovering spacecraft. She was seen rising up a beam of light by two separate
carloads of witnesses, Hopkins says. One witness was a woman whose au-
tomobile had been disabled as the UFO hove into view; her car's headlights
had flickered and gone out, its engine had died, and she had coasted to a
stop on the Brooklyn Bridge. The other witnesses were "an important in-
ternational figure and his two security agents," who were driving up South
Street near the East River when their car's mechanical equipment, too, had
failed.

"Since these abductions, I gather, are not normally witnessed," I say,
"Why do you think these people — the important international figure, par-
ticularly — were permitted to see it?"

Hopkins responds, "I think it was a deliberate sign."

I start to ask him more questions, but he holds me off, saying that he is
going to discuss the case in detail the following day.

As the four of us make our way across the Harvard Bridge to the morn-
ing's first conference session, joggers puff by and bicyclists dodge young
skaters on Rollerblades. The city is alive; buses wheeze past, private heli-
copters thud overhead. Below us, on the river, a cormorant, balancing on a
small rock to spread its wings to dry, warily watches the single-man shell
sculling against the current toward him. As I take in the world around me,
I suddenly realize I am making what psychologists at the conference refer to
as a "reality check."

The Sunday session begins sharply at 8:00 a.m. with a quick review of what
is missing from the alien craft. The ships have no bathrooms, beds, or
kitchens. There are no decorations, no "photos from home." It is noted that
the aliens don't seem to eat or sleep, get angry or joke.

The next speaker is John G. Miller, a board-certified emergency physi-
cian practicing in the Los Angeles area. Miller looks to be in his early for-
ties. He has dark, neatly brushed hair and a kind face. His quiet, modest,
somewhat shy and questioning demeanor is surprising considering the bed-
lam and trauma I presume he is immersed in at his job.

"As a physician," Miller begins, "the most consistent impression I get
from accounts of alleged alien examination techniques and 'medical' proce-
dures, whether from written reports or my own witnesses, is that I'm not
hearing about our kind of medicine. I mean our kind of medicine in the
broadest sense: modern terrestrial medicine. The most consistent feature in
these reports is the difference between reported alien techniques and proce-
dures and our own.

At the Conference

"The differences," he continues, "are great enough to invalidate any
theory of the origin of these reports that is based on the idea that they some-
how originate in the witnesses' own past medical experience or knowledge."

The doctor's point, I feel, \s an important one. If the abductees' stories
of the "medical procedures" carried out upon them by the aliens were a
screen memory for previous traumatic surgery, or a fantasy stemming from
their own unconscious, the procedures would not be so foreign to terrestrial
medical procedures.

Miller observes that the alien physical examination tends to ignore the
cardiovascular, respiratory, lymphomatic, and internal systems from the
umbilicus to the thorax. "They seem for the most part unconcerned about
the upper abdominal contents, including the liver, spleen, stomach, and
pancreas," Miller says, "which are often of great concern to the human
physician. . . ." In other words, the aliens seem to have no interest whatso-
ever in the major life-sustaining components of our bodies.

"By most accounts the cranium is a great focal point of the aliens' exam,"
Miller continues. "But their techniques are strange! We human doctors don't
generally stand at the periphery of our patients' visual field and stare at them.
We have no Mindscan procedures; we have to ask questions. . . .

"As some systems are seemingly shortchanged by the aliens, the derma-
tologic type [of exam] seems grossly exaggerated. Aliens are often reported
to inspect the entire skin surface minutely. Additionally, they are reported
to become startled or agitated when they find scars or new marks.

"Although female witnesses frequently report gynecologic-type exams
by the aliens," Miller continues, "I don't recall ever hearing a witness report
of a bimanual pelvic exam, the absolute mainstay of the human gynecolog-
ical exam."

Miller tells of cases where needle marks reportedly appear overnight,
"some in a triangular formation." But I don't get the impression that he
himself has seen this.

Miller spends some time discussing the abductees' stories of needles
being inserted in their navels, similar to what had been reported thirty years
earlier by Betty Hill. And he distinguishes between the alien device and the
contemporary Earth laparoscope, which "is much greater in diameter than
a mere needle" and "requires a small incision to insert."

Miller points out that he has never heard of aliens using gloves, tongue
depressors, EKGs. "Everywhere you look in these abductees' accounts," he
continues, "they are fundamentally different from human medicine. These
stories are not merely those of human medical techniques seen through the
distorted mirror of dreams or fantasies. At every turn, the aliens' alleged

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

modus operandi is fundamentally different from human practice. This sug-
gests to me," he concludes, "that these stories do not arise from the medical
experience or knowledge of the witnesses."

Miller is replaced by Joe Nyman, whose previous presentation had been
on familiar entities and dual references. This time he discusses the "com-
posite encounter model" he has worked out to describe the abductees' psy-
chological stages during an abduction.

"In working with people over the last fourteen years as they attempted
to relive their latent encounter experiences," he reports, "similar images
emerged that could be grouped as states of mind." He places a transparency
on the overhead projector listing four psychological stages in the abductees'
states of mind:

1. Anxious anticipation of something unknown. Forewarning.

2. Transition of consciousness from one's normal awake state.

3. Psycho-physical imposition and interaction.

4. Overlay of positive feelings and reassurance.

Nyman gives as an example of the first stage a witness making excuses
to leave a gathering. "She arrives home and goes through the rooms of her
house looking for someone, looking out the windows. She feels a sense of
urgency, a sense that someone is coming or that something is going to hap-
pen. It is a premonition," he says, "that something is going to happen in a
very short time."

During the second stage, Nyman continues, the witness "notices the
presence of lights in the room that become a figure," or lights outside. He
or she may have an out-of-body experience or become "caught in a beam of
UFO light." The transition, he says, can be described as "unusual phenom-
enon marking changes of consciousness from the normal awake state."

During the third stage, Nyman says, the psycho-physical imposition
and interaction is similar to what Dave Jacobs reported, but may also in-
clude emergency procedures to correct implants.

Once the physical procedures are completed, Nyman says, "stage four
begins: the overlay of positive feelings and reassurance. A sense of source
and purpose is given. A 'positive bias' is imposed to make the memory a pos-
itive experience." He gives as examples a tour of the ship, a trip to the "nurs-
ery" or to an alien landscape, a screen viewing, a meeting with the Council.

"The aliens may become involved in the witness's mission," Nyman
says, "such as healing, restoring, health-making through crystals."

Could Nyman be New Age?

He replaces his first transparency with a second:

At the Conference

5. Transition of consciousness to normal waking.

6. Rapid forgetfulness of most or all memory of the experience.

7. The marker stage.

8. The cycle interval.

"The final stages," Nyman says, "are: (5) Transition of consciousness to
normal waking — an after-sense of fear or pleasure or happiness or longing.
(6) Rapid forgetting of most, or all memory of the experience. (7) The
marker stage: what little is remembered is remembered as an incongruity,
with unresolved conscious memories and repetitive dreams. And (8) the
cycle Interval. These experiences are repetitive, lifelong," he concludes.
"The cycle may be as short as one day, as long as one year, or years."

During the question period an investigator rises to point out that at the
onset of an encounter, "dogs may bark wildly, then cut off. The dog won't
be the same for weeks. It may not go into the room from which the abduc-
tion took place."

Budd Hopkins follows Nyman with the observation that although the
procedure for returning the abductee to his or her normal environment is
usually similar to that of the abduction itself, "sometimes they make un-
usual mistakes that can present the abductee with a puzzling set of anom-
alous circumstances." Quoting Murphy's Law, "If anything can go wrong,
it will," Hopkins explains that a person might not be returned to exactly the
same place, and gives as an example a case of his where a woman was taken
from her bedroom and returned to the middle of the woods almost a mile
away from home. Her feet, at that time, were not tender. But when she had
made her way back to her house, finding her way slowly and returning freez-
ing cold, her feet were badly bruised and cut.

Another of Hopkins's cases: A five-year-old girl awakens outside her
house screaming that she had been taken into a "big machine in the yard." All
the doors in the house are locked, deadbolted from the inside. Her mother
asks her how she got out. The child responds she was taken through the walls.

Jenny Randies tells about an English police officer who was abducted in
his patrol car and then he and the car were returned upside-down on a nar-
row country road.

Hopkins tells of an individual returned in his car to the woods with no
tire tracks to show how it had arrived there.

Jacobs rises to tell of one of his cases, where a woman awoke in her car
in the middle of a cornfield with no crushed or broken stalks to indicate
where she had driven in or out. She sat looking around, then suddenly fell
back asleep. When she came to, she was turning into her driveway. "The
aliens had made a mistake," Jacobs says, "and set it right."

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

"These are very much in the small minority of cases," Hopkins adds,
"maybe in the range of 4 to 5 percent." He concludes by saying there is a
"paucity of physical traces of mistakes, but mental trace-cues are always
there to point out to a witness that they have been through an abduction
experience."

John Carpenter returns to discuss the "Resolution of Phobias from
UFO Data." A phobia, he explains, is "a psychological problem which
reaches deeply into a person's emotional feelings. It neither develops nor
vanishes without a significant emotional experience attached." To treat a
phobia successfully, Carpenter says, one must focus directly on its source.

He tells of a female patient of his who, at four years old, had developed
a phobia about her dolls: she thought they "moved at night." The following
day she had all her dolls destroyed. Even as an adult, she could not permit
her daughter to have dolls. During hypnotic regression, Carpenter explains,
it was revealed that "this intense trauma arose from confusing memories of
being with hybrid children aboard a UFO, one of whom, she believes, was
evidently her hybrid sister." Carpenter points out that, interestingly, his pa-
tient had not heard about hybrid children prior to this realization. Once she
recognized the source of her phobia, the woman "felt more comfortable and
was able to feel good about dolls."

He concludes his presentation saying, "To get to the cause of the pho-
bia is how you help them to get on with their lives."

Across the aisle from me Alice and Carol, the two women from Mary-
land, are urgently whispering together.

John Miller, the California emergency physician, follows Carpenter.
"In my day-to-day practice of emergency medicine, the question of why a
person decides they are ill and needs to be seen in an emergency depart-
ment is often one of the key features of a case. Some cases are, of course,
self-evident," Miller says, "e.g., a broken leg. But in a person with some on-
going, long-term medical condition, this issue is often especially important
as a source of information about the case.

"In abduction cases," he continues, "I think it is likewise important to
try to determine what caused the person to come to the belief that they have
been abducted by nonhuman Beings. The answer to this question varies in
the cases I have seen, but I think there may be some rough patterns — espe-
cially if the witness can identify a discrete moment of special insight. I have
come to regard this moment of development of insight as the Realization
Event, or RE: that event or moment that forces a person to suspect or de-
cide that they have had an abduction experience." Such an event, Miller re-
ports, can be triggered by physical signs: recent scars, bruises, punctures that

At the Conference

provide the witness "with personally tangible evidence that something
strange did happen," Miller says.

Prior to the Realization Event, Miller continues, an abductee may have
been able to explain away "a lifetime of strange experiences" as having been
dreams, or may have rationalized the experiences in such a way as to make
them appear normal. But after the RE the reality of the experiences forces
its way into the abductee's consciousness, and the individual, newly aware,
"may experience a sudden flood of previously unrecalled abduction mem-
ory fragments that provoke anxiety and a desire to explore these further."

Miller gives as an example a case of his, a young woman whom he calls
Annie J., who awoke while floating down onto her couch with a tall alien
standing over her. The moment she touched the couch the Being disap-
peared. She got up feeling "unclean," "anxious," and saw that it was now
two-plus hours later than when she had glanced at the clock "a moment
earlier."

Annie J. would have passed off this episode as just another bad dream,
Miller points out, "until she stepped into the shower and discovered a large,
painful bruise on her left hip. The mark had three sets of two possible punc-
ture wounds over it. This was her realization event," Miller declares. "Sud-
denly she couldn't make the 'dream' be a dream anymore."

Annie J. searched her house looking for a table or countertop she might
have struck herself on to have caused the bruise, but none was at the right
height. At that point "a lifetime of strange memory fragments and images
flooded over her and she felt she was now facing a horrible reality she
had always avoided in the past. She experienced severe anxiety and panic-
attack-like symptoms."

The realization experience might also be triggered by exposure to other
witnesses, Miller says. Annie J. discussed what had happened with her
roommate, who "recalled fragmentary memories of small alien beings and
odd nocturnal events such as awakening to find the bedroom filled with
blinding blue light and feeling fear, which was immediately replaced by a
profound sense of calm and the awareness 'It's all right. This is for Annie;
it's not for me.' " After Annie J. and her roommate had thoroughly dis-
cussed these occurrences, the roommate "came to believe she, too, had ex-
perienced abduction-type events. This was her realization experience."

REs can also be triggered by exposure to books and movies and as a re-
sult of hypnosis, Miller points out. He discusses a subject, "Rob," who has
always been aware of his abduction experiences and who felt that his child-
hood friends, "Jack" and his sister "Sue," had had experiences, too. Jack
"had long suspected he had had abduction experiences," Miller explains,

40 CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

"but his conscious memory was only that of an afternoon close encounter
with a disc device, with possible missing time, as he and Sue walked home
one day from school." Many years later Jack decided, after talking with Rob,
to seek hypnotic regression. "What emerged," Miller declares, "was a typi-
cal abduction experience in which Sue was aboard also." Jack's Realization
Event was the result of his hypnosis.

Sue, as an adult, "has become a highly religious person," Miller says,
"and believes these experiences were caused by demonic forces. She will not
discuss these events with anyone. She has had no RE, but understands her
apparent experiences in a way that feels safe to her."

During the coffee break in the Eastman lobby I overhear one woman ab-
ductee describing to another the ball of light that had entered her bedroom
and turned into a Being. "I said to the Being, 'I'm glad you're here,' " she tells
the other woman. " 'I want to ask you something. Where are you from?' "

The Being, taking her hands in his, did not answer.

"Do you come from a different time?" she asked him.

"No, it's the same time," the Being responded.

"How can that be?"

"If we were home now," the Being told her, "you would understand."
"Does that mean I come from somewhere else?"
According to the woman, the Being evidently did not — or would not —
answer her.

The first speaker after the coffee break is Keith Basterfield, the research of-
ficer for UFO Research Australia. A thoughtful, amiable, thin, dark-haired
man without any obvious Australian accent, Basterfield proposes that a cor-
relation may exist between UFO events (including abductions) and para-
normal phenomena such as poltergeists, apparitions, and psychic healing.

Witnesses, he reports, appear to have "an incredible history of psychic
phenomena which might explain why they were abducted." The question,
he suggests, is "chicken and egg": Are people abducted because they have a
long history of psychic ability, or is the psychic ability the result of a long
history of being abducted? Is a certain type of person more likely to have
paranormal and abduction experiences?

Basterfield mentions an apparent correlation between abductees and
microwaves or TVs turning on and off, streetlights blinking out, and com-
puters shutting down.

Alice, the Maryland abductee across the aisle from me, stiffens in her seat.

At the Conference

At 11:30 Sunday morning the first abductee panel assembles to discuss long-
term changes in their outlooks and interests and their subsequent lifestyle
adjustments. The panel consists of five women, in their late thirties to mid-
forties. Their remarkableness lies in how utterly unremarkable they appear.

First to speak is a petite, delicately featured, forty-two-year-old self-
employed businesswoman with two children, ages seventeen and twenty-
one. In October and November of 1989, she tells us, she had two
encounters with alien Beings during which she was taken aboard a space-
craft. She explains that she had had no previous interest in UFOs, had nei-
ther heard of the Betty and Barney Hill case nor read science fiction, and
that the abduction experiences altered her life.

One reaction, she says, smiling, is that after the abductions she changed
her name to "Star" and everyone she knows now tells her, "Oh, yes! That
name is you\"

Prior to the abductions Star had been in sales and marketing; but she
made an abrupt and unexpected career change between nine and ten
months after the encounters when she enrolled in a massage-therapy school.
The name change, she says, came from the alien Beings who told her "Star"
was a good name for healing. She has since discovered that she is a "natural"
massage therapist, and that her therapy is "good not just for relaxing her
clients, but for deep healing and adjusting their auras."

She reports that she can see auras, that she can feel a client's blocked en-
ergy vibration and return that vibration to normal, "which is what we call
healing."

Star, I subsequently discover, was involved in one of the most interest-
ing abductions and will herself be the subject of a John Carpenter presenta-
tion later on.

The next speaker is "Jennifer," a moon-faced, curly-haired woman in
a bright red dress. She has been aware of her abduction episodes since she
was a small child. From the ages of three to six, she tells us, she slept for
protection with her head either under the covers or beneath her bed.
Later, she would hide at night in her closet with the light on or sleep
under the dining-room table or behind the living-room couch. Following
her marriage and the birth of her daughter, she lived in a house protected
by deadbolt locks and an attack dog. Because she found herself growing
increasingly frightened that someone would steal her daughter, she began
taking courses in the martial arts.

In 1982, Jennifer continues, her daughter disappeared from their home.
Jennifer frantically searched the house, in vain, only to have the little girl
mysteriously reappear fifteen minutes later, crying hysterically that there

42 CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

were "monsters" in her bedroom. As a result, Jennifer reports, the child now
has the same fears she has.

After that experience, Jennifer and her family moved to nine acres out-
side the city. Their new property is ringed with lights and guarded by three
attack dogs. Her fear, she says, is gradually being replaced by an acceptance
of what has been happening to her. She has continued her study of karate,
because, she says, she needs to feel some control over herself and her life,
and is now nearly a black belt.

"Margaret," a neatly dressed, carefully made-up brunette in her late thir-
ties, is married to a physician. She experienced a Missing Time episode with
her two small children during which she awoke in a disc and saw a green-
house filled with trees. During her second abduction she was taken into a
large room where she was shown scenes of ecological disasters. What started
as "several disturbing events," Margaret says, has been transformed into a
"unique learning experience" that has brought her a growing concern for the
environment. She now considers what happened to her a "positive experi-
ence" which has created within her "an expanded ecological awareness."

Margaret reports that her internist husband "is in total denial" and that
as a result of the "events," she thinks, a biochemical change may have oc-
curred in her body. She would prefer to call her alien contacts "events," she
adds, instead of "abductions."

"Jane" is a conservatively dressed government secretary with a high se-
curity clearance. Because of her experiences, she says, she has become "more
tolerant of strange things," but admits that it is difficult to lead "a life filled
with secrets." She asks, "How do you open a conversation with 'Oh, by the
way, I was abducted by aliens'?"

She says she has learned not to talk about her abduction experiences
outside her house. She had two close friends, she tells us: one accepted what
Jane told her; the other couldn't handle it, and cut Jane out of her life.

"Brenda," a commercial artist, has gone public with her experiences.
She sells "alien T-shirts" that she has designed, and has made several ap-
pearances on television relating her UFO stories. "There is a temptation to
edit one's experiences if you don't feel they will be accepted," Brenda says,
then adds, "We weren't born believing in UFOs. The fear is beyond any-
thing you could imagine! The kind of panic — I can't describe it! Don't mis-
take the fact that because we're dealing with this in a matter-of-fact manner
that we aren't — or weren't — horribly panicked!"

I am wondering how I would behave if I thought something like what
the women have described was happening to me. I suspect that I, too,
would be careful with whom I spoke; I, too, would try to deal with it in a
matter-of-fact manner. I, too, would be scared out of my wits.

At the Conference

A suntanned Arizona psychologist next presents a brief report on the
abductions of children based on the case histories of a California psycholo-
gist/ordained minister who was unable to attend the conference:

Christopher, age eight, has been visited by an "orange-skinned man"
and a "gentle, gray alien."

Kevin, age eight and a half, also saw a "well-built orange man."

Warren, age twelve, was visited by a small, bald, round-headed, gray-
looking Being with a neon-green glowing ball.

In two other instances children described "glowing balls of light."

Jonathan, age five, was floated through his window into "a round thing"
that had appeared in the park across his street. Later, during the child's ex :
amination, the psychologist showed him the "coloring book" images de-
signed in 1990 by Budd Hopkins that comprise the Hopkins Image
Recognition Test (HIRT) for Children. These eight-by-ten images, taken
from the "real world" of images familiar to children, are: Santa Claus, Bat-
man, a clown, a policeman, a little girl, a Ninja Turtle, a little boy, a witch,
and a skeleton. A tenth image, that of a typical Small Gray, is inserted be-
tween the Ninja Turtle and the little boy. They are generally displayed to a
child in that order. When Jonathan was shown the Small Gray he ex-
claimed, "You know my friends!"

The Arizona psychologist notes that the California psychologist
thought it interesting that the young children's descriptions of the Beings
were very similar despite their being seen on opposite coasts.

Budd Hopkins rises to report that his test has been used by mental
health professionals and UFO investigators with great success and tells of a
case of his own in which one little boy was going through the cards and
when he came to the alien said, "Mommy, that's the man who comes into
my room and beams me up into the spacecraft. I saw you there, too, and
you were naked on a table."

"Small children do not recognize the alien figure," Hopkins continues,
"unless . . ." — and his voice trails off. .

John Mack tells of a child he was treating who blanched when he came
to the Hopkins drawing of the alien and said, "That's the man who's taking
me up on the ship!"

Several psychologists rise during the questioning period to complain that
Hopkins's "standardized" drawings are neither standardized nor scientific. I
am struck, nevertheless, by the children's ability to recognize the Small Gray's
face. Where would they have seen one before? They bear no resemblance to
the alien creatures in movies, television, comic books, or computer games.

After lunch Budd Hopkins discusses "The Roper Poll on Unusual Per-
sonal Experiences." Robert Bigelow, the wealthy Las Vegas entrepreneur

44 CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

who sat with Jacobs and me at breakfast this morning, had approached
Hopkins the year before, in January 1991, at a conference on anomalous
phenomena they were both attending in Philadelphia. There Bigelow had
suggested to Hopkins that if he and Jacobs were to create a questionnaire
that might be used in conjunction with a Roper Organization nationwide
survey to ascertain what percentage of the United States population may
have experienced UFO abductions, he, Bigelow, would pay for the publica-
tion of its results.*

It would not have been enough, Hopkins tells us at the conference, to
simply ask "Are you a UFO abductee?" since such a query would not nec-
essarily reveal "the extent of those with potential abduction experiences.
Many people, as has been pointed out, do not have enough conscious rec-
ollection of these events to answer affirmatively." Hopkins and Jacobs in-
stead designed their survey questions to measure "unusual experiences
which research indicated were closely associated with abduction histories."

Three separate Roper "Omnibus" polls, involving a total of 5,947
adults, were taken, in July, August, and September, 1991. Eleven Hopkins/
Jacobs-designed questions were seeded among the regular in-home service
Roper Reports questionnaire. Such a Roper Poll normally contains a mix-
ture of questions on topics such as lifestyle, behavior, attitude, activities dur-
ing the past week, optimism/pessimism about our country's future, and
other political, social, and economic issues.

According to the Roper Organization, every effort was made to place
the Hopkins/ Jacobs questions "within the preset questionnaire in such a
way as to eliminate question order bias and allow the questionnaire to 'flow'
smoothly." 1

Roper interviews were conducted face-to-face in the respondent's home
and usually took about fifty minutes. The poll taker presented the eleven
abduction-related questions to those being surveyed as follows:

This card contains a list of things that might have happened to you at
some point in your life, either as a child or as an adult, or both. I'd like
you to read down the card, and for each item tell me, to the best of your
knowledge, if that has happened to you more than twice, once or twice,
or never.

a. Seeing a ghost

b. Feeling as if you left your body

* Another sponsor of the questionnaire is rumored to be the Crown Prince of Liech-
tenstein.

At the Conference

c. Seeing a UFO

d. Waking up paralyzed with a sense of a strange person or presence or some-
thing else in your room [my italics]

e. Feeling that you were actually flying through the air although you didn't
know why or how [my italics]

f. Hearing or seeing the word TRONDANT and knowing that it has a
secret meaning for you

g. Experiencing a period of time of an hour or more, in which you were ap-
parently lost, but you could not remember why or where you had been [my
italics]

h. Seen unusual lights or balls of light in a room without knowing what was
causing them, or where they came from [my italics]

i. Finding puzzling scars on your body and neither you nor any one else re-
membering how you received them or where you got them [my italics]

j. Having seen, either as a child or adult, a terrifying figure — which
might have been a monster, a witch, a devil, or some other evil figure —
in your bedroom or closet or somewhere else

k. Having vivid dreams about UFOs. 2

The five questions I have put in italics (d, e, g, h, i) were considered "key
indicators" designed to elicit experiences related to abductions: Two others,
questions c (Have you ever seen a UFO?) and f (TRONDANT) were con-
sidered "check questions": the first permitted comparison with other, previ-
ous surveys, and the question concerning TRONDANT — a fictional word
invented by Budd Hopkins — had no meaning, secret or otherwise; it was
included simply to determine how many respondents might answer yes to
any odd or paranormal question. Approximately i percent answered yes to
the TRONDANT question — a figure from which one can extrapolate a
corresponding 1.9 million adult Americans. (The responses of that 1 percent
were not included in the findings.)

Seven percent of the respondents answered yes to having seen a UFO —
a figure corresponding to 13.3 million adult Americans. Interestingly, 11 per-
cent — 20.9 million — reported they had seen a ghost.

Eighteen percent (34.2 million) said they had experienced "waking up
paralyzed with a sense of a strange person or presence or something else" in
their rooms one or more times.

Thirteen percent (24.7 million) said they had experienced missing time
one or more times.

Ten percent (19 million) had experienced the feeling that they were ac-
tually flying through the air, although they didn't know why or how.

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

Eight percent (15.2 million) had seen unusual lights or balls of light in
a room without knowing what was causing them or where they were com-
ing from.

Eight percent also reported finding puzzling scars on their bodies for
which neither they nor anyone else could remember a cause.

In the study's conclusion the Roper Organization reported that its re-
search on behalf of the Bigelow Holding Company produced results that
were "unexpected . . . chiefly because the number of people reporting oc-
currences of items on the list far exceeded what was anticipated, and also be-
cause the answers cut across most demographic subgroups." 3

At the conference, Hopkins points out that 2 percent of those sur-
veyed responded yes to four out of five of the indicator questions, which,
he says, "shows that mental-health specialists have drastically underesti-
mated the number of people who have had unusual personal experiences."
That 2-percent positive response, Hopkins says, would indicate that 3.7
million Americans might qualify as probable abductees. Only 18 of the
5,937 persons surveyed answered all five indicator questions positively; but
even this figure, Hopkins explains, would suggest that at a minimum
560,000 American adults might be abductees.

Following Hopkins's Roper Poll presentation, the M.I.T. lecture hall is
in an uproar. Scientists in all corners of the large room protest that the sur-
vey is "full of holes!"; that is was "a waste of time, money, and opportunity";
that "your whole findings are based on the assumption that your 'key indi-
cators' will strongly predict who might be abductees, and these 'indicators'
do not have any scientific basis to suggest they are sound"; that "no system-
atic pre-tests were carefully done to find out how the respondents interpret
what they've been asked." When someone insists that because of the loose-
ness of the questions and the conclusions drawn from them, the need exists
for experts to design questions for future polls, John Mack responds some-
what plaintively, "How can we get our colleagues to validate the poll when
they totally reject the concept?"

I later speak with D. C. Donderi, an associate professor in McGill Uni-
versity's Department of Psychology, who is also attending the M.I.T. con-
ference. Donderi agrees with those who complained that the poll was not
valid. "None of the respondents were interviewed at length to determine
whether or not further investigation would indicate real abductions," Don-
deri says. "And no preliminary study established a quantitative relationship
between answers to the poll questions and the probability of a real abduc-
tion experience."

And because there is no validating evidence to support Hopkins's and Ja-
cobs's claim that the Roper Poll answers indicate possible alien abductions,

At the Conference

Donderi insists, "the response of any scientifically informed reader, who fol-
lows the absolutely essential scientific criteria of conservatism and demon-
strability, will then be to ask why he or she — or any other scientifically
competent person — should pay any attention to unvalidated poll data."

Donderi believes that the Roper Poll's salvation lies in the fact that re-
spondents who indicated a desire to participate in further studies recorded
their addresses and phone numbers, thus enabling researchers to "carry out
a systematic follow-up of the original data using volunteer respondents at
their own request." Extensive interviewing and testing of a subsample of
these volunteers would result in "an assigned probability of actual abduction
for every level of responses to the critical questions in the poll." Donderi
calls for the development and implementation of a careful, scientifically
proven, step-by-step procedure of interviewing and psychological testing of
those volunteer Roper Poll respondents, which would include mailings,
telephone interviews, scoring and blind coding of test results, and follow-
up contacts and personal interviews. "Each successively more detailed in-
terview stage will be used to validate the data from the earlier stage,"
Donderi points out. "Each more detailed stage will constitute the validity
criterion for the less detailed stage."

Donderi's project would be to obtain blind, unbiased evidence on the
probability that Americans have experienced UFO abductions, and it
would relate that evidence to the results of a nationwide randomized poll.
"Only under conditions where a hypothesis can be tested and can fail,"
Donderi insists, "will corroborating evidence — that high Roper Poll scorers
without serious personality abnormalities actually do have a high probabil-
ity of reporting a UFO abduction experience — be acceptable to the scien-
tific community."

Donderi is quick to recognize that even a validation study such as the
one he proposes would "not by itself convince the scientifically educated au-
dience that the UFO phenomenon is worthy of serious consideration."

Although Professor Donderi, it seems to me, is properly skeptical about
the findings of the Roper Poll, his presence at the conference suggests he is
not prepared to discard the extraterrestrial hypothesis entirely.

Donderi was fifteen years old when he started his freshman year at the
University of Chicago' as a Ford Foundation Early Entrance Scholar; he
received his BA. in liberal arts from that university at eighteen, and his
B.Sc. in biopsychology at twenty-one. He earned his Ph.D. from Cornell
five years later, in 1963. Donderi's doctorate was awarded in experimental
psychology, an area that, he explains, "includes questions of human per-
ception, memory, and how one understands the world — in other words,
how do we get input about the world, how do we interpret it, and what

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

brain mechanisms and psychological processes can be used to explain how
we do that?

"So twenty or thirty years ago, when I first began hearing that people
were reporting UFOs, I was intrigued," he tells me. "I was intrigued simply
because while I'm aware that it is certainly possible for people to fool and
mislead themselves and each other about this kind of thing, there was a cer-
tain kind of consistency to these observers' reports — that is, a lot of people
were reporting this kind of experience, and they were fairly concrete expe-
riences. Now," he continues, "it was clear to me from the profiles of the peo-
ple reporting UFOs that they were not all mentally unstable people, or
people with social needs to fulfill by telling these stories — and those were,
of course, the two theories about who reported this phenomenon used to
explain away or dismiss the whole UFO thing."

In 1966, "basically out of curiosity" but also because of the substance
and quantity of the UFO evidence being presented, Donderi joined the Na-
tional Investigation Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP). "When I
get independent corroboration of multiple witnesses of the same thing, and
they more or less match, then it doesn't take too many of those reports to
convince me that these people have seen something, and that the 'some-
thing' is outside of them and not a mental aberration." Even if 85 percent of
those sightings could be attributed to a meteorological phenomenon, a mis-
perception of Venus, a misidentified aircraft or its landing lights, "it's the 15
percent left over," Donderi explains, "often with photographic or radar ev-
idence, that is the basis for the UFO phenomenon."

In 1968 NICAP asked Donderi, as part of a scientific panel, to investi-
gate a set of six abduction reports. "Maybe two or three were convincing,"
Donderi tells me, "and the others had what appeared to be obvious prob-
lems — mainly with the witnesses." In his report to NICAP, Donderi con-
cluded that he "couldn't on the basis of the written evidence find any a priori
reason to discount the credible witnesses." And their stories, though in-
credible, "as far as they went, would have to stand."

Twenty-five years later, does Donderi still think people are being ab-
ducted by aliens in UFOs?

"People are being abducted. That's a reasonable conclusion when you
look at the evidence," Donderi tells me. "I can't say that with the same cer-
tainty I can say there are UFOs out there — which there are. But the evidence
is good, whether it's 'scientific' or not. Budd Hopkins is a bright man. And
so are Dave Jacobs and a lot of others — John Mack and John Carpenter, just
to name a few. They're smart enough not to be guilty of self-deception. Most
of the abductees are very convincing; they're not people with axes to grind,
or anything to gain from telling absurd stories. Nor do I think this is all some

At the Conference

sort of hypnotic confabulation egged on by investigators, which is the com-
mon critical response to this phenomenon.

"I think it's happening. But," he continues, "the fact is, I can't prove it.
And nobody in their right mind would bet the store on abductions without
better proof."

Later in the afternoon Jenny Randies speaks of "an interesting study in
which individuals were asked to describe imaginary abductions." She ex-
plains that if such a study indicated there were significant similarities be-
tween a "fantasized abduction" and an actually reported one, then it could
be argued that "actual" abductions must be fantasy as well.

The study's test group consisted of eleven male and nine female sub-
jects; 90 percent of the group provided graphic descriptions of how they en-
tered the spacecraft, 10 percent did not. Their methods of entrance, Randies
reports, "were totally different from those described by abductees. They
were brought on board by aliens carrying ray guns or they were drugged."

The occupants of the spacecraft were described by 55 percent of the test
group as small, 25 percent as tall. In the United Kingdom 35 percent of the
abductees describe the occupants as tall, 12 percent as small. None of the
imaginers in the group described Small Grays; nor did any describe being
given a medical exam, whereas 90 percent of the U.K. abductees routinely
report medical examinations. Seventy-five percent of the test group imag-
ined being questioned; 40 percent of the U.K. abductees said they were
questioned. Thirty-five percent of the imaginers said they were brought
aboard the spacecraft to be helped; no U.K. abductee feels he or she has
been brought aboard for any beneficial reason.

Perhaps in partial reflection of British xenophobia, a sizable percentage
of the test group thought the aliens were visiting as tourists.

Jenny Randles's findings strike me as significant: people who are asked to
describe imaginary abductions do not come up with the scenarios, sequences,
or Beings described by the overwhelming majority of abductees. The "med-
ical examination," such a major, recurring aspect of the abductees' stories, is
totally absent from the imaginers' accounts. I am reminded of what Dr. John
G. Miller had earlier pointed out: abductees' accounts of the medical proce-
dures carried out upon them by the aliens are so different from our own ter-
restrial medicine that it is extremely unlikely the origin of the abductees'
reports lies anywhere in the abductees' own past medical experience or
knowledge. In other words, if one of Randles's imaginers had been asked to
make up a story of an alien medical examination, it is likely that such an ex-
amination would have a discernible basis in our own kind of medicine.

And from Miller's and Randles's speculations, it is but a small associa-
tive step to Eddie Bullard's question of the night before concerning the ori-

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

gin of the aliens' physical descriptions: "If Hollywood is responsible for
these images, where are the monsters? Where are the robots?"

During dinner Sunday night I sit with Alice and Carol at Legal Seafood.
Both of them are to take part in the abductee panel scheduled for later that
night, and both are clearly apprehensive about it. We talk about their horse
farm and stay clear of conference topics.

The first speaker after dinner is co-chairman Dave Pritchard, who is
going to discuss a suspected implant. The major problem with this whole
issue of alien abductions, Pritchard acknowledges, is that there is no "hard
evidence." If, as one of the conference attendees suggested earlier, all these
implants are being done, why aren't they showing up on X-rays and MRIs
with the frequency one might expect?

"Physical evidence probably provides the best way to bring into scien-
tific consideration the hypothesis that there are extra intelligences present
on earth," Pritchard says. "By itself, physical evidence is not likely to put ab-
ductions on the mainline scientific agenda, but it might, rather, serve as a
powerful independent corroboration of the physical reality of some of the
abduction testimony. Therefore the pedigree, or link between the evidence
and the abduction phenomena which is alleged to have caused it, is crucial."

The "pedigree" of the alleged implant Pritchard examined seems to him
to be relatively sound. It came from abductee Richard Price, who says it was
placed in his body — actually midshaft in his penis — by aliens and over the
years worked its way out. Price says he has conscious memories of the ob-
ject being implanted in him; that, on some sort of magnified viewing
screen, he watched the Beings wire it up; and that a friend of his later took
a photograph of the implant device protruding partway out of Price's skin.

Price's implant, Pritchard reports, is amber-colored and measures one
by four millimeters. Pritchard examined it under a high-powered micro-
scope and, according to him, it appeared to have a core of translucent ma-
terial with a collagen sheen about it as a result of having been inside Price's
body for an extended period. Projecting up from the object were three lit-
tle appendages eighteen microns wide, or approximately one-quarter the
width of a human hair. Pritchard's analysis of the object's elements indicated
carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen were present, along with slightly less nitro-
gen than might be expected. What that means, he explains, is only that it
might be something that grew in Price, and that what is really needed is
some sort of interdisciplinary team of biologists, chemists, material scien-
tists, and the like who would really be able to look at a supposed physical
artifact and evaluate what it is.

At the Conference

"In any case," Pritchard says, "I don't have anything conclusive. What I
have is just what you usually get in this business: it will provide more beliefs
for the believers and will be instantly skeptified by the skeptics, and it's not
very good evidence if it won't move the lines at all. The point is to convince
the jury. ..."

There is a short break to give the abductee panel time to seat themselves in
front of the triptych blackboard and the conference audience. The panel
consists of two men and five women — including Alice and Carol.

The first to speak is "Virginia," a small, intense, pretty, dark-haired
woman in her late thirties. She tells us she has had numerous experiences,
including bedroom visitations, materializations, life flashes, phone pro-
grams, and blankets pulled off, and once met a man in public who, she
thinks, might have been an alien.

Virginia also has two childhood memories that she believes relevant.
She remembers screaming in her sleep, waking up with blood all over her
pillow, and her mother telling her not to touch her nose. The Beings, she
now believes, implanted something in her nose to monitor and study her.

Her second memory, Virginia tells us, is that of hiding in a closet and
looking up at two men with pointed faces and black shoes. They told her,
she says, about "people who live in a house in the sky and that I would go
up into that house in the sky and have babies and that they would take my
babies to a different place." She remembers the Beings telling her when she
was nine years old of her reproductive cycle and universal motherhood.
During one abduction, she says, she was "introduced in the sky house to my
sister, who looked exactly like me. She was a clone."

Through hypnotic regression Virginia recalled being seated inside a
"birthing room" aboard a spaceship, where she was shown hybrid children.
The Beings told her to sing and hum to the fetuses and to touch the hybrid
children around her. She "dreamed a baby was brought to her in a white
blanket. The baby," Virginia reports, "was three months old and conversed
telepathically."

During another abduction, a "naked, almond-eyed woman" showed her
images of nuclear war and told her the threat could be diminished through
understanding. She was also told that pollution could cause genetic muta-
tions. She says there are multilevel messages in the cosmos and that the Be-
ings told her "I could work with them — that they were not going to invade
us and that if they had wanted to they could have done that a long time ago.

"There are many different kinds of entities," she says. "We are part of
a universal consciousness. We are no longer spectators but are part of the

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

universal awareness. We should explore the mysteries of life our universe
offers us."

Virginia, I later learn, is one of Joe Nyman's abductees.

The second speaker, "Harry," is a handsome, thirtyish young man
whose dark brown hair is pulled neatly back into a ponytail. He is wearing
well-tailored black slacks and a black silk shirt. He has only recently come
forward with his abduction stories as a result of starting therapy with John
Mack; he now believes he has been taken up into alien craft at least three
times. Harry reports that medical procedures were performed on him and
that these procedures specifically "several times involved explorations
around my genitals." Harry is clearly embarrassed, uncomfortable talking
about this. "I have been reluctant to tell my story because I haven't wanted
to say, 'Yes, this happened to me.' "

He looks down at his hands folded on the desktop in front of him. "My
first conscious memory," he says, looking up, "was in 1988, when I was liv-
ing and working in the British Virgin Islands. I woke up one morning agi-
tated, afraid, with strange markings behind my ear. Subsequently I recalled
lying naked on a table paralyzed, but aware of my surroundings. A Tall
Being was standing next to me, watching and monitoring me. I could feel
my testicles being pulled to one side and a small tube entering me where my
left testicle would have hung. I was aware they were after something spe-
cific." In regression, he says, he suffers overwhelming feelings of humilia-
tion and cowardice.

In 1990, while still in the Virgin Islands, Harry returned to his house to
take a nap and was abducted a second time. On this occasion friends heard
an intense humming sound emanating from near his building and saw some-
thing "unexplainable." During the next few months, Harry began to remem-
ber having seen the Tall Being before and that the Being had told him, "This
is the only time we will do this to you." A machine was placed over his penis,
forcing him to ejaculate into a funnel. He felt "only rage. I realized what they
have always taken from me is my seed. At first I thought it was just an acute,
realistic dream. But it was much more severe, more real than a dream."

He pauses again, obviously distressed. Then he continues: "Our trauma
is that our consciousnesses are stretched beyond our abilities to understand.
We are left in a state of disbelief and shock. We have no way of integrating
what we perceive into our reality."

In January, February, and March of this year, Harry suddenly, unac-
countably found himself terrified, weeping. He had sought out Dr. John
E. Mack.

"I think the Beings are trying to understand our emotions," Harry says.
"Our ability to feel, our deep spirituality — these are our gifts to the uni-

At the Conference

verse. No matter how invasive their behavior, we are not psychologically
damaged. We are now participating willingly, I believe, and are part of a
plan for some future interaction."
Carol is next.

Carol Dedham is the forty-three-year-old manager of Alice's 180-acre
Maryland horse farm. Carol attended junior college, has lived up and down
the East Coast, and writes and paints in her spare time. She is tall, nearly six
feet, thin, green-eyed, with short, feathered, auburn-colored hair; she is very
attractive in a leggy, raw-boned sort of way.

Carol's hand trembles slightly as she lifts a rolled-up cardboard poster
onto the desktop in front of her. She clears her throat and, in a surprisingly
strong voice, begins: "I have not had hypnotic regression, but I have had
conscious memories since 1991 and recall things that happened in my
childhood.

"Several inexplicable events have occurred in the past several months:
marks, vehicle disturbances, wounds and bruises.

"According to my father," Carol continues, "even as a young child, I
would be missing for several hours. My father has admitted to me that he
had always known where and when to find me, but now feels he failed to
protect me.

"My first conscious memory was in 1954 at age five. I went on a car trip
with my father to Doylestown, Pennsylvania, for a meeting he had to at-
tend. It was a late afternoon in mid- July, but it wasn't sunset by any means.
We were on this dirt road, kind of a shortcut my father knew, and the car
just died. It was a new Plymouth station wagon and he couldn't get it started
again. There were empty fields on both sides of us, and ahead of us a big oak
that put the front end of the car partially in the shade, because the sun was
fairly low.

"It was a miserable, stinking, hot day," Carol continues, "and I remem-
ber I didn't want my father to get out of the car. I asked him not to get out,
but he said it was okay. I was on the passenger's side in the front seat. The
car window was down — we didn't have air conditioning in cars in those
days. He got out, closed the car door, went around to the front of the sta-
tion wagon, and when he lifted up the hood, all of a sudden I felt this real
cold air.

"It was cold enough to scare me, because it happened so fast! It wasn't
like a wind," Carol explains. "It was like somebody had removed the hot air
and replaced it with cold air in the snap of a finger, and it scared me. I
started crying, yelling to him, 'Daddy! Daddy! Daddy! Come back!'

"He closed the hood, came around to the driver's side, and leaned into
the window to say, 'It's okay, it's okay. Everything's okay.' He said something

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

else, I don't remember what. And then he got back in the car. He was try-
ing to comfort me," Carol continues. "I was still crying and carrying on. I
was so scared}. And even now I don't know why I was so scared. I didn't see
anything! I don't remember anything strange, except for that real cold air. I
was so cold! I was shivering and crying, and he was twisted on the bench
seat, his right arm over the back of the seat, his left hand holding my shoul-
der trying to comfort me. He was turned toward me saying, 'It's okay, Carol,
it's okay,' and the car started.

"He hadn't touched the ignition," she says, "The car just started by itself!
And that scared me again. I was really upset by that point. But he just turned
back in his seat, took the steering wheel, and drove away like it was nothing!
Obviously I quieted down, and all I remember is that we pulled into
Doylestown, drove to the office building where my father was supposed to
meet this guy, and it was nighttime. It was dark. The building was dark and
everything, and there was a note on the door saying, 'Sorry I missed you.'

"We couldn't figure out what was going on," Carol continues. "My fa-
ther glanced at his watch and said, 'Geez! What happened to the time? I had
no idea it took so long!' It was nine o'clock, nine-thirty, something like that.
From where we were when the car stalled to Doylestown was probably
about a forty-minute drive, and yet when we got there it was dark! So we
figured we were missing about an hour and forty minutes, maybe.

"Neither of us knows what happened. My father remembers me
screaming and crying and carrying on. He remembers the car starting. He
says he doesn't know why that didn't scare him, but it didn't. He just
thought it was weird.

"I've always remembered that story," Carol tells us. "It seems like a
pretty clear memory, and I never discussed it with my father until these
other things started happening. I talked to him about it just recently and he
remembers it exactly the same way."

Carol mentions unexplained scars on her legs, the "scoop marks" on her
shinbone and near the corner of her eye. She speaks briefly about an inci-
dent that happened last December 15. She was driving home to the Mary-
land horse farm after visiting her parents in Hagerstown when she saw three
bright white lights in a horizontal line through the tops of the trees. She rec-
ognized them, she tells us, from the time she and Alice had seen them near
their farm fifteen months before. She stopped the car, got out and walked
forward to get a closer look, and suddenly the light on the right, nearest to
her, zoomed toward her and halted directly overhead, "so close I felt I could
reach up and touch it.

"The light was blindingly bright," she continues. "I think I saw blue
lights, one on the left side and one on the right side of the craft." But the

At the Conference

light was so brilliant it hurt her eyes. She looked away to see if the other two
objects were still there, blinked, and the next thing she knew, she was five
miles away in her car, making a right-hand turn onto the dirt road that led
to Alice's horse farm with no idea of how she got there. She arrived back
missing three-quarters of an hour's time.

Carol next tells about an incident that occurred two and a half weeks
later, on January 2. She was driving the farm's pickup truck back from a
business dinner in town with a gaily wrapped, shoebox-sized Christmas gift
of homemade brownies, fruitcake, cookies, and fudge when she saw the
three bright lights overhead once more. This time, she tells us, she knew
what to expect. "I think I shouted, 'Oh, no — oh, no! Not again! Please, not
again!' I remember I blinked, and when my eyes opened I was eight miles
away, four miles on the other side of the farm." In a panic, Carol pressed the
accelerator to the floor. She was again frightened, disoriented. When she ar-
rived back at the farm, the contents of her briefcase were scattered about the
floor of the truck cab; the truck's interior had the "heavy" atmosphere of a
"greenhouse on a hot summer night"; and the Christmas gift had been un-
wrapped and resealed with masking tape, as if a child had rewrapped it.
Once again she was missing time. During a subsequent "flashback," she tells
us, she saw the Christmas gift in something's hands.

Carol briefly mentions an open, bleeding triangular wound she awoke
with in Pennsylvania on January 12 and a third missing-time incident in
March, during which she saw a strange Being in a four-foot-wide Stetson hat.

And then she is saying how she recently learned from her father that her
grandfather, too, had possibly had "experiences," and that she now has rea-
son to believe her son and granddaughter have had them, too. She unrolls
the poster she has brought and explains it was drawn two weeks before by
her four-year-old granddaughter, Stacy, when the child and her parents were
visiting the horse farm.

"I was talking to my son and daughter-in-law and not really paying
much attention to Stacy," Carol tells us, "and when she finished her draw-
ings, she held it up and said, 'Look, Grandma!'

"I looked at it and I took a deep breath thinking, I don't want to inter-
pret this! I thought I knew what I was looking at, but then I just thought
my imagination was running away with me and that I should just let her ex-
plain it. So I said, 'Tell me what you drew, Stacy'

"She said, 'You can see what it is.'

" 'I want you to tell me,' I said. 'Can you tell me what you drew?' "
In the center of the poster, outlined in blue Magic Marker, there is a tri-
angular object with its point straight down. At the top right- and left-hand
corners of the triangle, in red Magic Marker, are smiling faces, and between

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

them, a red circle drawn over and over again. Stacy explained that the tri-
angle was "a flying machine up in the sky" and that the red circle was "a red
light in the middle that's on all the time. And these up here," the child had
said, indicating the smiling faces, "are faces looking out of windows in the
flying machine. And this green part down here," at the pointed bottom of
the triangle, "is a green light, except when it opens up and it's a door, and
you can go in and of out the flying machine through this doorway. And
when they close it, it's a green light again."

Within the triangle Stacy had drawn a small kite in pencil. The child
had explained she had drawn it in pencil because "that just shows it's up in
the sky and flies like a kite, but it's not part of the flying machine so I didn't
want to do it in color." Scrawled in Magic Marker above the top of the tri-
angle were a series of red, black, blue, green, and red horizontal lines.
"These are lights, too," Carol was saying, "but Stacy said she had drawn
them like that to show that they moved — rotated. They weren't stationary
like the red light at the top of the craft and the green one at the doorway at
the bottom."

Carol then points to the left side of the poster, where there is a drawing
of what looks like an elongated gourd outlined in red. At the bottom of it is
a small figure, also in red. "Stacy said this is a long tunnel," Carol explains,
"and her imaginary friend, Nu, takes her through this long tunnel, and that
it was very, very red all over inside, like red light. And these green lines in the
tunnel were green marks on the walls on both sides, and there was a long
green stripe on the ceiling all the way all the way down this tunnel. I didn't
ask her about the figure entering the tunnel. It looks like it's wearing some
sort of helmet or has its hands over its head. I didn't ask and she didn't
volunteer. ..."

Carol is beginning to relax; she is holding up well.

She turns to the two separate drawings on the right-hand side of the
poster. The upper one is of a small grimacing figure outlined in black Magic
Marker with its arms outstretched; its trunk is colored blue. "Stacy told me
this is a picture of Nu," Carol says. "He was normally all in gray, she said,
but I hadn't given her a gray marker, so she used a blue marker. But Stacy
didn't think the blue was quite right, either, so she discarded the blue
marker and switched to black."

Carol points to Nu's "sleeves," outlined in black. "Stacy left this white,
she said, because his arms are so skinny she couldn't outline them. His legs
are skinny, too, she says, and he has square feet. When she got to Nu's head
I said, 'He's got big ears!' And she said, 'Those are not earsl Those are part
of his hat.' "

At the Conference

Carol pauses to explain that one night two weeks before Stacy had
drawn the poster, the child had mentioned Nu the first time. Stacy didn't
want her grandmother to say anything about Nu to her parents, because,
the four-year-old said, "Mommy and Daddy don't like him and when I put
my drawings of Nu on my wall Daddy takes them down." Carol had
promised Stacy that Nu would be their secret. That night, while Carol was
putting the child to bed, Stacy had told Carol that Nu was "gray all over,"
had "big eyes," and wore a flat hat on his head. Nu played with her all the
time, Stacy continued, and said good night to her every night. While Carol
was tucking her granddaughter into bed, Stacy had suddenly turned to her
bedroom door and said, "Good night, Nu!"

Startled, Carol had wheeled around to look, but the doorway was
empty. She glanced back down at her granddaughter, who was still staring
at the door. "Nu says good night to you, too, Grandma," Stacy said.

At the bottom right-hand corner of Stacy's drawing, below her sketch
of Nu, there was a small, red female figure inside a solid black rectangle. On
the two sides of the rectangle there were red stripes. Carol explains that in
the original drawing there had just been the figure with the red lines on ei-
ther side and that Stacy had said it was herself and then fallen silent.

"I asked, 'What are the red lines?' " Carol continues. " 'What is that?'
And Stacy said, 'That's a fence.' I asked ... I asked . . ." Carol pauses for a
moment, trying to collect herself. She has had a sudden, vivid, overpower-
ing memory of herself as a child hiding in a closet. She can feel the image
coming back, and she doesn't want to see it.

"I asked Stacy, 'Why did you draw a fence?' " Carol says, fighting the
image that is growing stronger in her mind. She is thinking, Not now! Not
now! Can't do this right now! Clearly struggling to speak, she forces out,
"And Stacy told me, 'It protects me!' "

But Carol, in her mind, is no longer at the conference. Suddenly Carol
is a small child hiding terrified inside her bedroom closet. Carol recognizes
she is in the home she lived in from the time she was four until she was eight
and a half. She has been inside this closet a lot, she knows. She is scared be-
cause she feels trapped and knows no one is going to help her. She is des-
perately tearing all the clothing off the hangers in her closet and stuffing
them into the cracks of the closet's old, glass-handled, wooden door. She is
filling the cracks so the brilliant blue-white light on the other side of the
door won't come through. She believes if the light doesn't touch her she'll
be safe. She is jerking her clothes off the wire coat hangers, urgently wedg-
ing skirts, pants, blouses, winter coats into the openings at the sides and
bottoms of the old closet door. Can't let the light touch me! Can't let the light

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

touch me! Can't let the light touch /w/She has to do it immediately — right
now, so she'll be okay.

There is a stillness in the M.I.T. lecture hall except for Carol's little
keening sounds. She is rocking in her seat, her eyes fixed, staring at some-
thing only she can see. The poster curls forgotten in her hand. A few of the
abductees have tears in their eyes. They, better than any of the rest of us, un-
derstand. They are leaning forward, willing her to come back to us. Alice,
next to Carol, gently lays her hand on Carol's arm.

"Stacy told me the fence was to protect her," Carol says, recovering
abruptly. "And before I could ask her why, she grabbed the black marker pen
and, really upset and tense, began hurriedly coloring in every little inch,
every little speck of white surrounding her, making sure she had covered
every bit of it. It was sort of scary, and I asked, 'Why did you do that?' you
know — 'Why did you cover all that in black?'

"And she said, 'I made a box,' " Carol continues, her voice strong again.
" 'I'm in the box and I have a key and I can lock myself in the box and no-
body can get in because I have the key.' And I asked, 'But why would you
want to lock yourself in a box?' And Stacy said, 'Because that way, when Nu
wants to take me somewhere I don't want to go, he can't make me go be-
cause I have the key.' "

Carol starts rolling the poster back up. "Well, now, to me, this is real
clear," she says. "It also tells me that this may have been going on for a while,
and only very recently has Stacy been becoming upset by it. She doesn't
want to go or do things with Nu anymore. ..." Carol pauses for a moment,
then concludes her presentation, saying, "There were questions I would
have liked to ask Stacy, but I didn't want to influence her. If this was indeed
a product of her imagination, I didn't want to add to that imagination by
giving her ideas to put into it — especially since all this other stuff was going
on in very close proximity. That and because it was somewhat of a surprise
revelation. I mean, until I came to this conference I didn't know about gen-
erational stuff. I had not heard about children's events, and I wouldn't have
imagined in a million years she would have had any such experiences — or
even that she has had them."

It is Alice's turn to speak next. Forty-one-year-old Alice Bartlett is the
owner of the Maryland horse farm and an employee of the Environmental
Protection Agency in Washington. She possesses a bachelor of science de-
gree in experimental psychology from a small, private southern college and
a master's degree in forestry from Michigan State. Alice's Scandinavian an-
cestry is evident in her pale complexion and the thick blond hair that falls
halfway down her back. The first time I saw Alice I was struck by how much
she resembled the woman in Andrew Wyeth's earlier portraits of Helga:

At the Conference

fine-boned but sturdy, soft curves but strong muscles. What Alice lacked
was Helga's seeming placidity. Alice's face is taut with fear.

She begins by telling how she hired Carol to be her barn manager and
they became close friends. "Although our personalities are quite different,"
Alice says, "we think a lot alike. We finish each other's sentences. We've
shared experiences."

Alice tells about the first experience she and Carol had of the three
bright lights over the horse farm. It had occurred in September 1990, two
years before. The lights, Alice says, had been "acting in very strange ways.
And what was odd about the whole thing was Carol and I have different
memories of seeing them. Carol remembers a cluster of three lights with one
of them zipping off to one side, then the others disappearing. I remember
there being five lights. Three in a triangle and two to the left. I do remem-
ber one from the triangle shooting off at a very, very fast rate of speed, and
then I remember walking into the house and sitting down and watching
television until it was over. Carol remembers me being outside with her the
whole time."

Alice next tells of seeing a six-foot Being in her bedroom and how when
she turned on the light, nothing was there. She tells of incidents commut-
ing back and forth in the dark to her job in Washington and how banks of
overhead streetlights would flicker and go out on the Beltway as she passed.

She describes an incident that took place only a month before the con-
ference during which she and Carol shared the same dream: a Tall Being
peeking around their bedroom doorways and two Small Gray Beings at the
foot of their beds.

"I don't know what's real and what isn't anymore," Alice says in a
stricken voice. "I don't know what are dreams and what aren't. I just don't
know!" she says, and she begins to cry.

The next speaker, "Robert," is a burly, bearded man in his late thirties.
He was in Brooklyn, driving a cab, he says, and his dispatcher sent him to
a house. When he arrived at the house he saw aliens behind its windows.
The next thing he knew, it was three hours later; his dispatcher had been
trying to reach him for an hour and a half. His wife, when he returned
home, noticed three marks on his back, by his right shoulder. A doctor sub-
sequently looked at the marks and thought Robert had suffered "some sort
of radiation burn."

Under hypnosis Robert recalled two glowing objects that had come
through his cab windows. One went to the front of the cab and the other to
the back. His taxi had suddenly begun to spin around as though on a
turntable. Everything went dark, and then the cab was inside something
huge. Some creatures next led him out of the taxi to a chair, where a cloth

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

was wrapped tightly around his chest. The Beings, Robert says, then began
discussing the wavy lines that appeared on a screen nearby.

Afterwards, Robert tells us, he was taken back to his taxi; it again started
to spin, and "the cab with me in it was back on the street. A creature pointed
his finger at me, I felt a pain in my right shoulder, and then he was gone."

On Robert's right sits "Pat," a pretty, blond-haired woman married to a
dentist in the Midwest. She has three children: a daughter aged twenty, an-
other, aged six, and a thirteen-year-old son.

Pat tells us that when she first began to realize she was in contact with
aliens, she was confused; she didn't know if she should tell anyone. "Put
yourself in my shoes," she says. "If you were one of the few in the world who
could see color and most others could only see black and white, how could
you explain 'red'? I felt others wouldn't understand."

A year ago Pat's older daughter started having "vivid dreams." The young
woman, who had not until then had any interest in aliens, Pat tells us, was
upset because her dreams had appeared so real. "They seem like dreams,"
Pat's daughter had told her, "but they're not. They're too real to be dreams."

"I really felt sorry for her," Pat continues. "I understood what she was
going through. My daughter remembers going up in a spaceship, and she said,
'Mom, you were there!' She recalls my telling her and the rest of the family,
'Don't be afraid. We're safe.' My daughter was nineteen at the time. She has
continued to have real-like dreams. Sometimes there is a light in her room at
night, she told me, and she has to shut her eyes because it hurts her eyes.

"I have heard my son, who was eleven at the time, say to the Beings, 'I
don't think I really want to go with you now,' " Pat tells us. "He didn't sound
angry or frightened. He just a couple of times repeated that he didn't want
to go with them. And I remember getting out of bed and going to my son
and saying, 'It's okay. You don't have to go if you don't want to.'

"My son tells me he feels that he's flying a lot at night."

Pat reports that one night her husband awoke and "jumped clear out of
bed" to attack an alien in their bedroom. She found her husband on the
floor "dazed and confused."

"What are you doing?" Pat asked him.

"They were here!" he said, picking himself up from the floor. "They
were in here! They're not supposed to be in here. This is my house!"
Pat asked her husband if the aliens had done anything to him.
"I don't think so," he said.
"What bothered you so much about them?"

"I just didn't like them being here. This is my house. My room. It's my
property. They shouldn't be here! Somebody's invading my property!"

At the Conference

6 1

Pat remembers her husband tossing and turning in his sleep all night,
and the next morning, she tells us, "he was mad at me because it seemed to
him like I should have done something. He told me he thought I was bring-
ing aliens into our bedroom at night and yelled at me to get them out. I
think he's afraid he's going crazy."

It was just after this, Pat says, that "some small bluish-gray aliens with
three folds in their forehead entered my room at night, and I remember
waking up and seeing them looking at me like they were angry or some-
thing." (They looked "angry," she later tells me, because they had no eye-
brows, "just the three lines across the forehead, which gave them a stern
look." One of the Beings was standing beside the bed, and all Pat could
see was his head. The bed, she explains, was about three feet high, so the
Being was about four feet tall. He had no hair, no ears, and almond-
shaped eyes.)

Their presence, Pat is saying, began to annoy her, because she believed
these were the same aliens her husband had tried to attack when they had
bothered him. "At one point," she tells us, "I grabbed one's arm just above
his hand, but after I saw how I had frightened him, I let him go. I have not
had any intrusions or any of those experiences with them since then, and
my husband hasn't told me about anything else happening. So those ones
haven't returned."

(When I later ask Pat what the Being's arm had felt like, she says, "I did
not feel a lot of heat coming from it. It had neither a cold nor warm body
temperature. If you can imagine a snake without scales. . . . You wouldn't
feel the bones inside a snake, so it wasn't totally squishable in your hands."
The arm was firm but very thin: about an inch and a half to two inches in
diameter. When she grabbed its arm, Pat says, the Being did not recoil or
try to pull away; it just seemed "surprised." And then when she released it,
the Being "turned around and there was a globular light where the wall
should be and he just walked through it.")

"My experiences with the aliens have been good," Pat tells us at the con-
ference, "and I have cooperated in every way. They have taught me a lot of
things and have never deceived me. I appear to have a connection with these
particular aliens and an ongoing lesson in my life. I experience with them a
place where time doesn't seem to exist. It makes no difference to me if I can't
convince other people this is true; I only know I have had the experience.
The truth is the truth," she says in conclusion, "and it will still be there
when science is ready to see it, or is equipped to validate it."

The last abductee to speak is "Ann," an East Coast single woman in her
mid-thirties. Ten years ago in August, Ann says, she "dreamed" a Small Gray

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

opened for her the hatch of a 7-foot -long, 4-foot-wide, 4#-foot-high egg-
shaped silver vehicle. At that time she had no idea UFOs existed, nor had
she ever read any UFO literature. She tells us she entered the craft, a two-
seater, and in front of her was "a red button, a pedal, and a pull bar." The
Small Gray told her to push the red button, so she did. "I felt as though I
had been struck by lightning," Ann tells us. "I was flattened against the seat.
All I saw was a horizontal band of light and then I was descending through
dark gray clouds toward a dark gray sea."

The craft landed on a narrow spit of land and she climbed out onto a
surface composed of uniformly rounded stones, all 3% inches by 1 inch by
iX inches high. Ahead of her was a forest, its foliage a ruddy orange. There
was some leaf litter on the floor of the forest, she says, and some smaller
trees and brambles. In a clearing were other Beings, one of whom was
"part bovine, part reptilian." She also saw, she reports, "very large, foot-
wide snakes which appeared to have wings." In the clearing she found an-
other human, a male, who appeared somewhat "out of it," she says. "I
took his arm and guided him back to the craft. We got in, I reversed the
buttons and flew us back." The next thing she knew she woke up alone in
her bed.

The following morning, Ann continues, she began to remember an-
other "dream." "It was intensely, physically realistic," she tells us. "I was
swimming toward a brilliant green shore in water which, like the air, felt
thick and warm. In fact, there did not seem to be any sharp demarcation be-
tween where the water ended and the air began. Nor was there any defini-
tion between where the water ended and the sandbar began. There was a
very small beach on the shore," she tells us, "which showed no evidence of
tidal action. Ahead of me was a little field of neon-green grass and beyond
that a very, very steep hill with a wooden observation tower on top con-
taining other humans. I slowly climbed up the hill," Ann says, "and I was
so exhausted by the effort I promised myself to start exercising."

Eight years later, in February 1990, Ann and several others with her
sighted a triangular-shaped UFO with other little craft circling about it.
"Oh, I know them!" Ann heard herself saying. "I've been in one." She began
seeing a therapist and told him her story. Some months later, her therapist
told her to contact an abductee in the Midwest. According to Ann, the ab-
ductee asked her, "Do you remember that planet with the funny water, the
neon-green grass, and that teeny-tiny beach? And oh, by the way, have you
started exercising yet?"

Ann seems as puzzled by her account as I am. What is one to make of
such a story?

At the Conference

During the questioning period John Mack asks the abductee panel,
"Do you arrive at an interpretation of your experience through cues related
by your investigator?" They all deny being influenced by their therapists.

In response to another question addressed to the panel, we learn that
with the exception of Virginia, none of the abductees had any prior interest
in UFOs. Virginia, who as a child was introduced to her cloned sister in the
Beings' "sky house," admits she has been fascinated by UFOs and the para-
normal since she was thirteen.

Budd Hopkins asks the abductee panel if they remember any childhood
experiences.

Harry, who was taken by the aliens on the British Virgin Islands, says
that as a child he felt he had a "guardian angel in the sky" and remembers
thinking it was due to his Catholicism. "Now," he says, "I'm not so sure."

Carol says that as a child she had "an imaginary dog who took me for
walks to places where children couldn't go."

"What color was the dog?" Hopkins asks her.

"Gray," Carol answers without thinking. And then, suddenly, she looks
surprised. " Oh!" she says. It has dawned on her that the gray dog could be
a "screen memory" for a Small Gray Being.

Pat tells of having had two Small Beings who would sit with her when
she was a child. Once they told her to picture in her mind what she wanted
and it would come to her. She imagined her mother bringing her a drink of
water; her mother appeared carrying a glass of water. "Okay," Pat tells us she
recalled saying to herself, "let's make it a little tougher." She pictured in her
mind a diamond. The next morning, a neighbor brought her a diamond-
shaped piece of glass.

Someone asks the panel, "What do you need from your therapists?"

"I'm having difficulty taking that first step," Carol responds. "I don't
want to accept that all this might be real. I need to know that there is some-
one qualified to help me cope with the fear and to deal with the. panic,
stress, and fear reactions I feel."

Alice, who has been very quiet, says, "The last six months of dealing
with the outside world have been very difficult. One morning I wake up and
I can't stop crying. The next morning I wake up and I'm twinkling. I have
to interact with all these people at the horse farm and I can't tell them any-
thing! It's all a secretl "

Marilyn Teare, the lovely silver-haired California therapist, rises and in
a gentle voice says to Alice, "I'm a horse person, too." She asks the abductee
panel if they ever notice anything strange or abnormal prior to the appear-
ance of the Beings. Several of the abductees report they do sense in advance

64 CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

when the Beings are about to come. Pat reports she feels heat on one side of
her face and a ringing in her ears. Ann, too, says she hears a ringing in her
ears, and sees flashes and patterns of light on the ceiling.

Marilyn Teare reports she has a ringing in her ears right now. One of the
abductees says she has a headache. A young woman in the audience says she
feels sick to her stomach.

The panel is excused.

Carol is desperate to escape the lecture hall. She wants to be alone; but as
she steps out from behind the row of desks, Budd Hopkins catches up with
her to ask some questions. Hopkins explains he is currently researching
cases of multigenerational abductions and wants to talk to Carol about her
granddaughter.

Carol is too upset to talk. She tries to brush by him; and when Hopkins
persists, she tells him, "Budd, I really can't talk to you now. Can't you see
I'm upset?" When Hopkins says something more to her, Carol simply
pushes him aside and rushes out of the lecture hall.

That night, while Carol is driving Alice and herself back to their motel
in Framingham, one of the banks of orange lights on the Massachusetts
Turnpike goes off as they approach it and pops back on as they leave. Carol
glances over at Alice, who just shrugs. "It's not something I can control,"
Alice says. "It's not something I do consciously. It's just there."

CHAPTER IV

At the Conference

Day Three

Early Monday morning, before the third day of the conference begins, I
meet with Pat, the member of the previous evening's abductee panel whose
husband had accused her of bringing aliens into their bedroom at night. We
meet in the courtyard outside the Eastman lobby. She looks freshly
scrubbed and rested, young and utterly ingenuous.

Although, Pat tells me, she lives in a small, quiet midwestern town
where almost everybody knows everybody else, very few people in the com-
munity are aware of her contacts with the aliens, "because," she explains,
"its just not necessary to tell them: I don't want to talk about what has hap-
pened to me because I can put myself in the other person's shoes: it's a re-
ally hard thing to understand or believe."

I ask Pat how many "experiences" she has had. She thinks for a moment,
then says there have been at least five that she has consciously recalled, but
she has known ever since she was an infant that "something — at that age I
wasn't aware enough to call them 'aliens' — was coming to visit me. I felt a
real sense of family with them. I remember waking up in the crib with the
anticipation that they were coming and grabbing hold of the bars of the crib
and waiting."

"You weren't scared?" I asked.

"No."

"What did they look like?"

"They had the typical features of typical Grays, except, to me as a child,
they looked illuminated."

"Illuminated? As though there were a light from within them? Did
they glow?"

"Yes," Pat says. She again thinks for a moment, then adds, "They were
maybe an offshoot of the Small Grays we've heard about at the conference.
Of the same family, but a little different."

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

The Beings, she tells me, had slit mouths and spoke with her telepath-
ically.

"And when you went to their spaceship," I ask, "how did you get there?"
"At that age I don't remember ever going to a ship," she says.
"Can you tell me about a typical experience?"

Pat pauses once more. It is clear she wants to answer my questions as
honestly as possible. "A typical experience now would be if, during the day,
I got riled up about something I didn't want to be angry about — I'm seek-
ing peace in my life, that's my goal," she adds in explanation — "and if I got
riled up and couldn't sort it out in my head, I'd have like a discussion with
them. They come and I might ask them, 'Well, why do humans behave this
way?' And we kind of kick it around between ourselves. Usually they reply
with a question to me like, 'Well, why do you think they behave this way?'
and so on. I think they were showing me there's a different way of life, an
easier way to achieve your goal. The term 'way shower' seems to be a real
good fit here. They gave me suggestions and they sparked my interest in
things that are not part of this physical world."

"So these discussions would take place in your home?"

"Not all the time. Sometimes it's in the ship. Most of the time it's in a
quiet area. It seems like it's a desert, or it just looks like it's a desert."

"When you're aboard the ship, how big is it?"

"I haven't had a whole lot of what some people describe as tours of the
ship. That's not my experience. I really couldn't tell you its size."
"Can you tell me anything about it?"

"Well, they're very tidy little individuals," she says, laughing. "You
don't see any clothing around the floor. You don't see food — or at least I
didn't. You don't see a lot of paraphernalia around. Either it's in the walls —
and I'm assuming this, because I don't know where they store their instru-
ments, since I've never experienced any examinations — or they don't have
a lot of stuff. I did see a table, but there was nothing on it. And the walls
are really strange. I've thought about this. They look like if you could so-
lidify water."

"You can," I say. "We Earthlings call it ice."

"Well, this isn't ice," she says thoughtfully. "It's still. Motionless. Like
water in a glass."

"Would it be solid if you touched it? Or would your hand go through it?"
"The wall would be solid."
"What about doors?"

"I didn't see any except for the entrance I came in. I entered through
just a hole at the bottom," she says, then hesitates. Pat isn't sure how she ac-

At the Conference

tually entered the spacecraft. She doesn't recall any steps or ramp; she re-
members floating up, but doesn't recall a beam of light.

I ask her if she ever saw any babies on board the ship.

"I remember one time seeing a room filled with containers with light em-
anating from inside them," she tells me. "I remember seeing little embryo-
type things in the light. I don't recall seeing them in different stages. I know
one of them caught my attention and that's the only one I remember. I'm as-
suming the reason possibly that one caught my interest is because maybe /had
something to do with it myself."

"Because eggs were taken from you?"

"It's not so much eggs," Pat says. "I think it's genetic tissue that's taken
and spliced together."

"And how would they have acquired this tissue?"

"I guess either they do it through scrapings of the skin, or . . ." Pat
pauses. "Sometimes I wonder about hair clippings."

"Did they clip your hair?"

"No, but it's something I've been wondering about. I really couldn't tell
you how they do it."

"But you believe it was some sort of cloning?"

"That's what I feel is present — not to say that they don't take eggs, but
I don't think I've had any eggs taken from me."

It is almost time for us to file into the lecture hall for the morning's first
presentation. But there is one more question I want to ask Pat. I am curious
what her thoughts are about the conference. What has she gotten out of it
so far?

"It has helped me to understand the investigators' point of view better,"
she says. "If I were an investigator, I wouldn't be gullible, either. It's hard to
accept something that's been totally dismissed. Sometimes you feel like a pa-
tient who has two surgeons go off into a separate room to discuss your case.
You don't know what they're going to do and you have the feeling they're
hiding something from you. But here," Pat continues, "it's like the patient
gets to watch and listen to the surgeons talk about what they want to do,
and you can hear their disagreements. This is an opening up to the experi-
encer what they, the investigators, believe is going on, or what they don't be-
lieve is going on, and I think that's great."

I decide that for the time being the point is not whether /believe what
Pat has told me is true but that Pat believes it is true. And of that there is no
question in my mind.

Psychiatrists will often speak of how a patient "presents," referring to
the general impression of well-being the individual gives. To me, in both the

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

manner in which she spoke of her experiences and the details she provided,
Pat came across as normal as she would have if, in other circumstances, I had
asked her what it was like to be a small-town dentist's wife — in other words,
straightforward, open, and eager to help me understand.

The first speaker of the morning is Jenny Randies, who, because of her
machine-gun delivery, has become one of my favorites. Again, her pre-
sentation is precise, reportorial. She has studied forty-three abduction
cases in Great Britain, she tells us. The information from twelve cases was
gained through hypnosis; seven were "dreams"; six were "creative visual-
izations"; and eighteen were spontaneous or conscious recollections.

Out of the forty-three incidents, she states, thirty-seven were single
events. There were 1.29 witnesses per case, compared with 2.56 per UFO
sighting; 53 percent of the abductees were female and 47 percent were male.
Their average age was 28 years (compared with 27 in the United States, 27.5
in Europe). They came from all occupations: police officers, factory work-
ers, university professors, artists, etc. Twenty-five percent of the abductions
took place in the open air; 51 percent in the bedroom; 24 percent in a car.
At the time of the abductions, the experiencers were idling, relaxed. Twenty-
two percent reported "information implants"; none reported physical im-
plants.

"At the start of the experience," Randies continues, "55 percent saw a
UFO; 30 percent saw a bright light; 12 percent saw a Being. The experience
occurred 43 percent of the time between midnight and 0600; 7 percent be-
tween 0600 and 1200; 22 percent between 1200 and 1800; and 28 percent
between 1800 and midnight. The most common time was between 0300
and 0500.

"Physical description of the entities is as follows," Randies continues.
"In Great Britain they are 12 percent Grays, 35 percent Nordics, and 44 per-
cent of normal height, as compared to United States, where 73 percent are
Grays, 6 percent Nordics, and 12 percent are normal height, which is com-
parable to Europe, which is 48 percent Grays, 25 percent Nordics, and 15
percent are normal height."

Over 25 percent of the sightings and/or abductions took place in three
ten-mile-square zones, Randies reports — Pennine, Northampton, and
Weaver, which, she points out, are where the crop circles occur.

"One final note," Randies says. "Witnesses in Great Britain, too, report
the 'Oz Factor' — " the ufologists' term for alterations of the surrounding
environment — "traffic vanishing, birds stop singing, everything slows
down, the cessation of sound and feeling. Thank you."

At the Conference

Two weeks after the conference Jenny Randies responds to some queries
I sent her. "I think the case for continuity of evidence is overstated," she
wrote in a very small, precise script remarkable only for the flamboyant
swoop of its Fs:

The abduction experience has marked differences with the UFO phe-
nomenon. (Note my figures in one of my papers that 2.56 witnesses per
case see UFOs on average — which is not much different to a figure for
witnesses to bank robberies, incidentally — but 1.29 experience abduc-
tions. . . . That alone shows fundamental distinctions.)

It is perfectly possible to consider that UFOs and abductions are two
separate phenomena linked by an accident of social context. In my view
the evidence is overwhelmingly that UFOs are a variety of things and
there are some quite exciting research projects which have nothing to do
with aliens and which may well be leading us towards the areas of science
they reflect (e.g., plasma vortex studies, bioelectrical and neurophysiolog-
ical field effects or microwave pollution research). Abductions are estab-
lished subjectively as real experiences, but their objective reality is much
more in doubt. I don't think this emerged from the conference. It was very
much an American-oriented event. (I think only 3 or 4 non-Americans
were invited.) In fact, UFOlogy outside of the USA is very different and
does not presume the alien origin of the data.

No case is perfect. 95%+ of UFO sightings have conventional solu-
tions. I've seen very impressive data crumble on proper investigation
(which it rarely gets). But there is some residue and we have good photo-
graph and trace case data. (My two prime examples would be the Trinidad
Island photographs taken by a scientific survey team during the I.G.Y. —
See my book, Science & the UFO's — Basil Blackwell, Inc. — the book that
[Whitley] Strieber credits in Communion with triggering his memory —
and the Trans-en-Province, France, landing where a massive scientific in-
vestigation funded by the French government, Gendarmerie, and the
Space Centre in Toulouse provided major radiation-inspired changes in
the soil and plants which followed clear physical rules.)

I've written 15 books about UFOs, all published by reputable pub-
lishers, and I'm still struggling to get to the answers.

"P.S.," Jenny added, "Presently I am trying to explain to befuddled jour-
nalists 7 years of research just conducted into spontaneous human combus-
tion. You may be surprised to hear that a link with UFOs emerged quite
unexpectedly in this research. UFO researchers need to broaden their per-
spectives away from little grey men!"

I wondered if Randies knew about Louis Joseph Vance, the author of
the best-selling Lone W&^stories (about a gentleman crook), who died in

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

1933 apparently of spontaneous combustion while sitting quietly in his New
York apartment. The press reported that his head and upper torso "looked
as if they had been pushed into a blazing furnace," yet his lower torso was
hardly burned at all; nor was anything else in the room burned but his chair,
which was totally consumed except for the frame. 1

Following Jenny Randles's presentation, Keith Basterfield, the research
officer for UFO Research Australia, speaks about his country's abduction
experiences, which, he tells us, "were very much the same kind of experience
as the U.S., but on a numerically smaller scale." He reports that 55 percent
of the Australian abductions take place in the bedroom; 35 percent in a
rural, outside environment. "Yes, we do have some interesting cases," he
says, "but we're way behind you on research."

Basterfield's most striking story concerns the marvelously named Mau-
reen Puddy, a thirty-seven-year-old housewife from Rye in Victoria whose
experience he offers in direct refutation to David Jacobs's assertion that "in
the abduction phenomenon, abductees are never physically in place when
they have an abduction experience. . . . Researchers have not collected a sin-
gle case of an abduction in which the victim was actually in a normal loca-
tion while the abduction was occurring." 2

Mrs. Puddy's experiences began at 9:15 p.m. on July 3, 1972. She was
driving home from a visit to her son, who was hospitalized south of Mel-
bourne, when, according to Basterfield's report, "just after passing over the
railway crossing, the roadway was lit up by a blue light. Thinking at first
that the light was coming from a helicopter similar to the one which had
taken her son to hospital, [Maureen Puddy] did not take too much notice,
even though later she recalled hearing no noise at all. Realizing that even
though it may have been a helicopter," Basterfield continues,

it was too low for a normal flight, she accelerated away trying to get out
of the blue light. However, she was unable to do so. She therefore slowed
down, thinking that the pilot may be trying to get her attention. The light
stopped with her.

At this time she decided to stop the car — a thing she would not nor-
mally do on such an isolated stretch of road, devoid of streetlights. Shield-
ing her eyes against the light, she looked up to see an unusual object
present. She panicked, for it was shaped like two saucers, lip to lip. It ap-
peared stationary, some 20-30111 [50-75 feet] behind the car, at an angu-
lar elevation of 45 0 , some 20-301T1 above the ground. The road at this
point was about 8m [20 feet] wide, and the object appeared 4-5 times
wider than this and some 5-6m [12-15 f eet ] ' n height.

There were no seams visible; no windows, no aerials, or in fact pro-
tuberances of any kind. A silver-blue light radiated from it, appearing iri-

At the Conference

descent in nature. It was this light which lit up the road. A low humming
noise, likened by Maureen to an elevator moving, was heard while she was
outside of the car looking at it.

Standing there, looking at the object, her reaction was to get away
from it as fast as she could so she returned to the car and drove away at
high speed. As she was driving she noted that the object was visible out of
the right hand side (driver's) window, and that by leaning forward and
looking out of the top of the windscreen, the object appeared to be keep-
ing station over her vehicle. This pursuit continued for 13 km [nearly 8
miles]. Then the object moved backwards, there was a streak of light and
it was gone.

Mrs. Puddy drove to the nearby Rosebud police station and reported
the event. The next day, she telephoned the Royal Australian Air Force
and reported the incident to them. The RAAF sent her out a form which
she completed and returned. 3

On Monday, July 24th, Mrs. Puddy would normally again have gone to
the hospital to visit her son, but did not because of a gasoline strike. On sev-
eral occasions that day she heard someone calling her name. Her husband
and daughter heard nothing. Throughout the night she was unable to sleep
because she kept hearing a voice inside her head calling, "Maureen . . .
Maureen . . . Maureen." She even went outside the house to look, but saw
nothing.

On Tuesday, 25th July 1972, Maureen was again driving home alone from
the hospital, when at the same location, and the same time, another inci-
dent occurred.

At the railway crossing, she stopped her car to let a man leading a cow
cross the road. A few hundred metres further on, the road was lit up with
a blue light.

She recalled her thoughts as being, "My God, it's back!," then: "I'm not
stopping for anything." She accelerated her vehicle away from the location.

However, suddenly the vehicle's engine cut out as if stopped by turning
off the ignition key. Thinking that the engine had stalled, she turned the
key, but this had no effect. The car slowed down and came to a halt, all by
itself at the side of the road. During the period it was slowing, Maureen
turned the steering wheel, but it did not alter the direction that the car went
in. Pumping the brake had no effect. Putting the gears through all their po-
sitions did nothing either. However, the car's lights [stayed] on all the time.

She maintained that there were no road bumps as the car came to a
halt. There was, in fact, no sensation of the road being under the car at
this stage. By this time she was terrified.

All of the normal sound: "drained out of the air," and there was an
eerie silence. She felt: 'like I was sitting in a tube — a completely closed

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

vacuum tube.' Then she felt that she was receiving some audio transmis-
sions, but she could not understand them.

She thought to herself: "I don't understand." The audio impressions
were then understandable in "perfect English." She later related that this
voice or impression sounded: "Too perfect," just like a "... machine
recording," and that they also appeared to be inside her head, not like a
normal voice from outside.

The voice said: "All your tests will be negative." This was followed by
a 2-3 second pause, then, "Tell the media, do not panic, we mean no
harm." There was another pause estimated as a minute long, then finally:
"You now have control."

During this period, which lasted perhaps a minute and a half, she had
remained seated with her hands clutching the steering wheel. She believed
she could have moved if she wanted to, but she decided to remain still. As
the audio impressions finished, the vehicle engine started itself; the blue
light went out, and the object was suddenly gone. It had been visible, the
same thing as on the third, out of the top of the windscreen, but was sud-
denly no longer there. This departure coincided with the approach of an-
other road vehicle.

(She again reported the incident to the police and to the RAAP, who
sent her another form to complete.)

The next day, puzzled as to whether to tell the media she finally de-
cided to telephone 3 television stations and one interviewed her. Radio
station 3 AW had her speak on an open line program, on which 2 other
callers confirmed having seen something unusual in the area at the time.

Firstly, the wife of the man leading the cow called in to say her hus-
band had seen a blue light but did not go back to take a look. Secondly, a
couple reported having seen a blue light in the sky. 4

And then there occurred the "abduction" that Basterfield felt refuted Ja-
cobs's assertion that there was "not a single case" of abductees remaining in
"a normal location" while an abduction was taking place. Basterfield's report
continued:

On or about the 22nd February 1973, Mrs. Puddy related that she had
again heard a voice calling her first name, all night long. In the morning
she said she felt an "eerie presence" around the house and she: "caught a
message" telling her to "Go back to the same meeting place."

She telephoned the Victorian UFO Research Society and two mem-
bers [Judith Magee and Paul Norman] agreed to meet her at the spot
where Maureen's car had stopped all of its own accord.

On the way alone to the spot, an entity just suddenly appeared in the
car's front passenger seat. Mrs. Puddy almost crashed her car in surprise.

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The entity had long blond hair and wore a ski suit. This suit was white in
colour, and was tucked in at the wrists, and went over his feet. Just as sud-
denly, the "man" disappeared from her side.

Arriving at the nominated spot all 3 people then sat in Maureen's car.
Suddenly, she saw the same "man" had appeared just outside the vehicle.
Neither of the other 2, Judith Magee or Paul Norman, could see anything
unusual present. Maureen says that the "man" was beckoning her to join
him outside the vehicle. She refused to get out of the car.

Suddenly, according to the others present, Maureen "fainted." She
began a verbal description to them whilst she was in this state of apparent
unconsciousness.

She related that she was in a round room somewhere, which was lit,
but there was no visible source of illumination. This scene was indistin-
guishable from the consensus reality that we call "real life." The "man" just
appeared in the room, in which there was also a mushroom shaped object
rising up from the floor. This was stemmed, with a broad domed top.
There appeared to be an inner hemisphere, wobbling around, and it was
covered with what looked to be' hieroglyphics on it.

The "man" told her to describe what she could see, and this she did,
to be heard by the 2 in the car. She could see no doors, or windows in this
room, and so began t o be scared. She started to cry, then woke, still in the
car, with tears in [her] eyes, saying she could not remember anything that
had just occurred. The 2 in the car filled her in on what had transpired.

About a week after this abduction, Mrs. Puddy was driving with her
son. He was sitting in the front passenger seat, when all of a sudden the
same "man" appeared, sitting between them on the bench seat. The
weather conditions were of rain, and low visibility. Yei while the "man"
was there the scene in front of her, which should have been of rain and
cloud, cleared abnormally, and she could see for kilometers. The "man"
simply disappeared and the rain and bad visibility just reappeared.

All who interviewed [Maureen Puddy] stated that she was a normal,
healthy individual. She was absolutely perplexed by the entire series of
events. She received nothing but ridicule from people for reporting the
episodes; yet no one was ever able to describe her as other than (her words)
"an average housewife." 5

Keith Basterfield stresses that these events occurred in 1972 and 1973,
before the subject of abductions was "known to any wide degree in Aus-
tralia;" and that they occurred to a "witness of impeccable character" who
was "totally perplexed by the episodes" and "apparently subjected to an es-
calating sequence of events terminating with an abduction, then a 'visita-
tion' a week later." Basterfield himself spoke to Maureen Puddy ten years
after these events, and she remained adamant that what she had described

74 CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

had been "real." "However," he says, "and this cannot be stated clearly-
enough, she never physically left the presence of UFO researchers Judith
Magee and Paul Norman during the abduction."

In response to a letter I wrote Basterfield after the conference, asking
him what he thought was going on, he replied:

In looking at, and working with, Australians reporting abductions my first
response has been to explore potential psychological explanations. Hence
a look at such topics as lucid dreams, transient memory disorders, hypno-
gogic and hypnopompic imagery, and fantasy-prone personality theory.
All these are currently in mainstream psychology.

Interestingly, these do not appear to be able to explain abductions, in
totality. Next, on to psychiatric disorders. Again, nothing to date can ex-
plain abduction claims in totality. In summary, conventional psychology
and psychiatry fall short of providing an explanation.

So, what next? In my opinion, there still remains much work to be
done. In terms of understanding altered states of consciousness. Conven-
tional wisdom has not, in the main, conducted research into altered states.
Who knows what we may learn? It is this area I believe that we need to
tackle next in the abduction context, before taking a quantum leap to
"aliens visiting us." Thus my viewpoint on abductions is that we need
much more research before "going public"; and declaring "they" are here.

On the question of hard evidence for "aliens abducting human be-
ings." The more I examine the evidence for such things as implants and
missing fetuses, the more nebulous it becomes. Abduction research lacks
hard evidence, or we would still not be debating the issue. However, it is
tantalising enough to continue to research. 6

Psychologist Gilda Moura, the Brazilian representative to the confer-
ence, reports that most abductions in her country occur in the south and
southeast, and that there are fewer in the northeast. The major difference
between Brazil and the United States, she tells us, is that the majority of ab-
ductions take place outdoors. In a study of 137 abductions alleged to have
taken place in Brazil, 67 percent of the abductors were Small Grays, 19 per-
cent were Tall Beings. The purpose of the abductions seems to be genetic
manipulation. This manipulation, she points out, is an indication of alien
interference in human development, and the message is that this is not the
first time such interference has occurred.

Moura reports a case similar to Basterfield's Maureen Puddy account, in
which a native woman describes taking a long journey underwater to a cave
site during an abduction without ever leaving her chair.

Spiritualism plays a much greater role in Brazilian abduction accounts,
Moura explains, than in the United States.

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"The phenomenon is global in scope," former NICAP acting director
Richard Hall says, summarizing the morning's international reports, and
warns that "we can't make too much of differences in alien types in differ-
ent countries until a better data base is achieved."

Hall reports he is surprised to find that there seems to be "an amazing
amount of description of machinery and equipment" on board the space-
craft: "tables, overhead gadgets, examining equipment." Six different inves-
tigators in the United States, plus investigators in Great Britain, Argentina,
and Spain, report an "overhead scanning device on rails or tracks moving
above the person," Hall says, adding that the gadget apparently makes a
"clicking sound." In addition, there are similar reports of "hand-held in-
struments" or devices with lights at the ends that seem to be some sort of il-
luminated probes.

There are also numerous reports of skin scrapings, nail clippings, and
blood samples being taken; striking similarities in messages and imagery;
and numerous confirmations of the "Oz Factor" as well as reports of fog or
mists surrounding cars. "The question is, How much mental manipulation
are we dealing with?" Hall asks.

During the question period Dr. John Miller, the Los Angeles-area
emergency-room physician, suggests that the skin scraping is usually done
for bacterial or fungal searching. It may be performed to determine genetic
types for the acquisition of DNA, he says, "but it is not a good source."

The next speaker is Richard Haines, whose presentation is "Multiple
Abduction Evidence: What Is Really Needed?"

Haines is a dynamic, wiry little bald man with a meticulously trimmed
mustache, wire-rimmed glasses, and the neat, precise manner of speech and
dress of a retired British army major.

"A multiple abduction," Haines announces, "is two or more people who
claim to be taken at the same time to the same place. Reliable evidence from
two or more people to corroborate the event is needed." He describes one
of his own cases, that of two twenty-two-year-old women who first met in
1974 and had known each other for one year before they were both ab-
ducted. They then remained friends for seven months after the event.

He explains the three-stage hypnosis process he has formulated in order
to reduce as much as possible any contamination of the information ob-
tained from a subject because of an investigator's bias. The first stage com-
mences once a subject's deep trance has been achieved and tested. Haines
then suggests the subject, "Tell me everything you see, feel, and hear about
the event." He then sits back and listens without interrupting.

76 CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

At the beginning of stage two Haines asks his subject, "Tell me every-
thing you see, hear, and feel, plus everything you say out loud in conversa-
tion, what you hear back, and what you're thinking." Again, he sits back and
listens.

At the start of the third stage, Haines has the subject go through the
event a third time, but adds, "This time, I'm going with you and I'll be able
to talk with you." It is during this stage that Haines asks questions in order
to elicit information that, he hopes, will clarify or fill out the story.

Haines reports he used his three-stage hypnosis process on the two
women subjects, hypnotizing them separately so that neither would be
aware what the other had said. When he came to the third stage, he tells us,
he had a list of 103 questions.

Independently, the women described the aliens as without expressions
on their faces, with no hair, tiny holes that looked like noses, mouths that
they did not use, and little half-inch openings for ears that were shaped like
the letter k. Furthermore, there was a 67 percent match on their descrip-
tions of what had taken place. "Incidentally," Haines adds, "they did not say
they were taken into a UFO. They said they were taken underground."

Someone asks, "Could these two young women's shared vision have
been a folie a deux?" — a psychiatric term to describe a shared paranoid dis-
order or an induced psychotic disorder. In a folie a deux a delusion devel-
ops in an individual who is in a close relationship with a second person with
an already established delusion. The first individual's delusion is similar in
content to the second's. 7

John E. Mack denies that such could have been the case in Richard
Haines's two subjects. Their shared abduction scenario could not have been
a folie a deux in that "highly detailed, objective, descriptive, corroborative
evidence was provided."

John Carpenter, the next presenter, agrees with Haines. "Independent
interviewing and hypnotic regression of multiple witnesses to a UFO close
encounter," he tells us, "are essential steps toward establishing a credible ac-
count with minimal opportunity for contamination, suggestion, or influ-
ential interactions. The separate hypnotic investigation of two or more
participants greatly decreases the likelihood that imagination, delusion, or
confabulation — the replacement of fact with fantasy in memory — serve as
explanations for these encounters.

"In a November 1989 incident," Carpenter continues, "two women
were driving in a remote area of western Kansas when they encountered a
UFO and lost two hours of time. They experienced anxiety, insomnia, irri-
tability, and bewilderment as a result of that night. Neither woman claimed
any knowledge or interest in UFOs at all. They initially believed that they

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never left their car nor observed anything further. Hypnotic regressions,
performed independently, revealed abduction scenarios with at least forty
direct correlations between their recalled accounts."

Carpenter's detailed report of this incident was published in the Journal
of UFO Studies, the publication of the J. Allen Hynek Center for UFO
Studies (CUFOS) . It is worth looking at in some detail here. In the report
he refers to the two women as "Susan" and "Jennifer." (Susan, we now know
from her panel appearance at the conference, is actually the abductee who
changed her name to "Star.")

" 'Susan,' " Carpenter wrote, "is a 42-year-old businesswoman married
to an engineer with two children ages 17 and 21. . . . She states that she has
never given the subject of UFOs any attention and had not read any books
on the subject. 'Susan' appears to be an honest . . . candid woman with no
psychological problem or history of such difficulties. . . . 'Jennifer' is a 49-
year-old widow with two grown stepchildren, ages 33 and 35. A college grad-
uate with an MSW degree, she works as a freelance photographer. . . . She
is somewhat shy and reserved but yet independent and adventuresome. She
stated that she has not read any books or seen any movies concerning the
subject of UFOs. . . . She is perceptive in noting small details and will keep
thorough little journals at times." 8

The two women were administered three objective psychological tests by
CUFOS. Neither showed any overt signs of pathology or psychological
problems as measured by the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory
(MMPI). Both had low to moderate scores on the Index of Childhood Mem-
ory and Imagination (ICMI), which measures a tendency toward fantasy-
prone behavior and thought. On the Creative Imagination Scale, which
measures hypnotic suggestibility, Susan's score indicated a moderate ten-
dency toward suggestibility; Jennifer had a score near the top of the range,
meaning she would be a good hypnotic subject and potentially quite sug-
gestible.

According to Carpenter's CUFOS report,

On November 6, 1989, these two women were on the road, pleasantly
driving home to St. Louis from a conference in Aspen, Colorado. Jennifer
was faithfully documenting in her log and had just noted it was 11:40 p.m.
as they pulled out of a gas station in Flagler, Colorado. They had decided
they would drive to Goodland, Kansas, before stopping for the night.
Susan had been averaging 75-80 mph on Interstate 70; Goodland was 72
miles away.

Shortly after leaving Flagler, they caught sight of a bright object ahead
of them in the east and slightly to the south but very high in the sky. They
noted that it was fairly stationary but always stayed in the same location

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

in relation to their car despite noting that the moon changed position in
relation to their car and the object. They clearly observed flashing, colored
lights on the object and occasional little movements. Then they both
noted the rather sudden appearance of many smaller green lights near the
brighter UFO.

While Susan drove, Jennifer kept her eyes on the skies for nearly an
hour. Several times they pulled off the road briefly and dimmed all their
lights so that they both could get a better view. During the last time they
did this, Susan noted that the car clock indicated the time was 12:40 a.m.
Suddenly they both saw a ball of light descend to within a hundred feet of
their vehicle, hovering over a field ahead and to their right. Below this ball
of light appeared a V-shaped "cone" of soft, "fluffy" white light reaching
toward the ground with colored rays of pastel pink, blue, and lavender.
These beams seemed to establish the edges of the "cone" and crisscross
slightly at the bottom point. The women performed a "reality check" at
this point by verbalizing to each other what they were seeing, and they re-
ported the same visual details. They also both noted "black waves"
through the lower portions of the windshields — reminiscent of heat waves
on the horizon of a desert highway. They felt the excitement and rush of
adrenaline, only to next remember that they were pulling back onto the
road and feeling strikingly different. Now they felt similar feelings of ex-
haustion, irritability, and a preference for silence and solitude — quite an
amazing and sudden transition in a matter of what seemed to be only sec-
onds in time. 9

The two women arrived in Goodland, Kansas, according to what they
initially told Carpenter, "just minutes later." Susan noted the time and Jen-
nifer documented it in her notebook as being 2:30 a.m. Once in their motel
room, Carpenter reported, they noticed "startling changes in their physical
appearance that matched their irritable feelings and fatigue." Jennifer's
cheeks were red and flushed; Susan was pale, "like death warmed over," she
later said.

The more prosaic and routine explanations for their alleged UFO ob-
servance were sought. Astronomer Walter N. Webb was able to discount
their possibly having confused sightings of Venus, Jupiter, Saturn, or Mars
with a UFO due to those planets' movements at that time of the month. Al-
though the Taurid meteor shower had reached its peak four days prior to the
women's experience, it "would not," Carpenter noted, "account for the hov-
ering 'soft white ball,' " though "it could seem to describe the 'light hurtling
out of the sky' at them. But then," Carpenter continued, "meteors are not
known to stop in mid-air a hundred feet away and display a 'cone' of pastel
light beams toward the ground. The witnesses had enough time to draw

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each other's attention to it, take turns describing it to each other, and ob-
serve simultaneously the 'black wavy lines' around the car."

That the object's "bright flashing lights" might have been due to at-
mospheric conditions refracting distant light can also be discounted due to
the remoteness of the Kansas area from which they viewed it. And although
"autokinesis" (the apparent motion of an object due to the small, involun-
tary movements of one's eyes) must be considered, both women are
adamant that "the bright UFO was not a star, and that it paced their car, ap-
pearing in the same location through the windshield, despite the changing
angle of the car in relation to the moon and other reference points."

It wasn't until the morning following their UFO encounter that the
women discovered that although they believed they had driven three hours,
they had used up only an hour's worth of gas. Susan and Jennifer subse-
quently checked their road map and noticed they had traveled but seventy-
two miles in that three hours' time.

Upon their return to St. Louis both women continued to feel anxious
and irritable. Susan, because of the UFO sighting and her determination to
resolve the puzzle of the two hours of missing time, contacted a friend in-
terested in UFOs, who in turn put her in touch with the state director of
the Missouri Mutual UFO Network (MUFON). The MUFON state di-
rector alerted Carpenter.

On November 12, 1989, five days after the encounter, Carpenter began
interviewing Susan. He tape-recorded her conscious recollection and then
performed a one-hour hypnotic exploration into her period of amnesia.

"Susan was nervous, curious, cautious, and determined at the start of
her session," Carpenter wrote, then continued:

The major aspects of her experience were recovered, but the flow of de-
tails indicated a need for more time and further investigation to fully doc-
ument what seemed like memories. The need for absolute secrecy and no
communication with Jennifer was explained and strictly emphasized. . . .
Susan indicated that she would have no difficulty maintaining her silence
because she and Jennifer were only acquaintances living miles apart with
no regular communication or routine contact with each other. 10

Carpenter next contacted Jennifer and invited her to participate. She,
too, was curious about what had happened, but maintained that upon see-
ing the UFO she had neither left their car nor seen anything further. Nev-
ertheless, she met with Carpenter on November 24, twelve days after his
initial session with Susan, and just seventeen days after the two women's en-
counter with the UFO. Susan was also present at this time.

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

At that meeting, Carpenter reported, Jennifer confirmed that "Susan
had not revealed any information whatsoever." Afterwards, Carpenter asked
Susan to go into another room and he put Jennifer through two and a half
hours of clinical hypnosis, during which she was able to "break through the
veil of amnesia to recall a wealth of detail." She, too, was then asked to seg-
regate herself from Susan.

At that point Susan was brought back into the treatment room and placed
under hypnosis for approximately an hour and a half. "Although she reiterated
the same basic recollections," Carpenter wrote, "Susan had much more time to
notice additional details and explore other aspects of her experience." 11

In On Stolen Time, his summary of the UFO abduction mystery,
Bullard wrote, "Few investigators have looked closely at the order of events
in abductions, yet comparison demonstrates a striking consistency of form
among the reports and thereby provides valuable evidence for a coherent
phenomenon. . . .

"No case includes every possibility," Bullard continued,

but a case qualifies as correct if everything it does possess follows the pre-
scribed order. A notable majority of cases (84 percent of 193 detailed sce-
narios) conforms to this pattern. The reason for this order belongs within
the phenomenon itself and begs for an explanation. A calculation of the
probabilities for these arrangements happening by chance alone reaches
one in tens of thousands, if not more. Anyone who would dismiss abduc-
tion stories as products of random chance might also be interested in pur-
chasing a bridge in Brooklyn. 12

If one compares Bullard's detailed "model" for an abduction scenario to
Susan and Jennifer's tape-recorded, hypnotically recalled accounts, a strik-
ing number of similarities occur:

Both witnesses, under hypnosis, first saw the UFO in the distance — the
prelude to what Bullard refers to as the "capture."

Jennifer: "I see this bright light — but it's not moving like a plane. ... It
is moving just a little bit ... to the side and down a little bit . . . colored
lights, too — the changing of lights. ..."

Susan: "It has the white light — in front of it. On the back and sides, it
keeps flashing colors. . . . It's making little movements. . . . It's like
oval . . . lights around the front. . . ."' 3

Both saw a fluctuation in the UFO's glow:

Jennifer: "[The UFO] would change intensity."

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Susan: "I can see the UFO getting brighter! . . . Oh, it's much brighter!
It's much closer!" 14

Both saw numerous little green lights moving around the UFO. And as
the UFO approached and hovered nearby, Susan and Jennifer both saw
"black wavy lines" visible around the windshield of their car and observed a
"cone" or "V" of pastel-colored light rays one hundred feet away.

Jennifer: "This cone . . . white — soft like clouds with white behind it —
all around . . . and streaks of colored light coming downward . . . like
purple and blue and white and pink . . . crossing at the bottom like — like
beams . . . like sunrays in a way ... at the bottom of the 'V or cone."

Susan: "There's a red ball of light . . . coming out of the sky. . . .
These two color lines are coming out of it simultaneously from each
side . . . and they look like a 'V — and they form a V down to the Earth."

Jennifer: "This cone . . . was real close to us . . . like a hundred feet or
so. . . . It was close over on the righthand side."

Susan: "Close . . . close, uh, maybe a hundred feet." 15

Both women consciously claimed that following this initial sighting of
the UFO they had proceeded on their trip without interruption, and that
only subsequently did they realize that they were unable to account for two
hours of their time.

Under hypnosis both women recalled that after they had observed the
cone-shaped beam of light, they were "captured." Susan saw two Beings ap-
proach the car. One instructed her to stop the engine and reassured her that
they were "friends." She found herself unable to react while both she and
Jennifer were levitated out of the car in sitting positions.

Both women recalled being escorted by the two Beings and floating up
into the night sky toward the round craft as their car grew smaller beneath
them. Neither witness can recall exactly how they got inside; neither recalls
any doorway.

Jennifer: "I do seem to see the car from outside. . . . I'm behind it, look-
ing down at an angle . . . above the right side of the roof. . . . I'm higher
than just a little bit ago! ... I see a pinhead of where the car was — it's real
tiny now!"

Susan: "[The car is] way down there. . . . It's real small . . . the more I
look at it the tinier it gets. It looks like I'm seeing [the UFO] from, uh,
like I'm in the sky. It's like . . . like we don't weigh much. It's more like
we're floating!" 16

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

Both women enter the craft and realize they are inside a small, round
room with geometrically shaped windows and a reddish glow.

Jennifer: "I see some windows . . . different shapes . . . one's round . . .
like a panel in between each of these. Another one is like ... a
square . . . then a panel . . . kind of looking through a window that's
not . . . flat, but curved. A triangular window ..."

Susan: "There's some windows . . . different shapes . . . like squares all to-
gether. . . . There's panels . . . rectangle windows — sideways. It changes
shapes — "

Jennifer: " [In the first room] there's a span of orangy-red color — kind of
diffuse. . . . There's a kind of glowing . . . um, white — not single light,
but kind of an area that goes around like so. And it glows — kind of like
red — sometimes burgundy — with some white ... it changes."

Susan: "There's some pink light coming from somewhere . . . the rest of
the light looks white."

Jennifer: "Wherever I am . . . it's round like a ring. . . . There's no cor-
ners in this room. It's round . . . not like a round ball, not oval — kind of
like frisbee round."

Susan: "[The room] is more like a circle! It's more round." 17

Through the craft's windows, both women see stars and a blue Earth-
like planet.

Jennifer: "I'm looking out the windows . . . it's like, oh, like
Earth . . . it's not so far away that I can't distinguish some lights
and . . . we're high — we're high!"

Susan: "I can see — looking out one of the windows ■. . . a bluish-like, ink-
blue globe of some sort outside the window . . . like pictures you might
see of planets . . . it's not a picture! ... a deep blue. It looks bluish. It's real
pretty." 18

Both women experienced the second stage of Bullard's model scenario: the
"examination." They recalled being taken into a large operating amphithe-
ater-like room. Both recalled — from their different perspectives — Jennifer
having been placed on a table under a bright light and her being calmed by a
touch or gesture of a Being's hand. Both report that Jennifer remained dressed.

Jennifer: "There's some tall columns that go from the floor upward. . . .
I'm lying on a table. ... I can see the pole above . . . and the bright light
above — right in the center."

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Susan: "There's a column that comes down — real close to the table."

Jennifer: "A panel of lights light up. . . . It's as if they're getting data from
their panel of what looks like very sophisticated equipment — kind of all
one moulding . . . it's all smooth . . . lots of different colored lights. . . ."

Susan: "There's some instrument-looking things — like panels . . .
some cabinet-things . . . built into the wall."

Jennifer: "[The large room is] kind of an auditorium — like oval-
shaped . . . seats that go, oh, six or eight levels, and they all look alike on
each side observing us."

Susan: "Oh! I'm in a big room — a big oval shape with a domed ceiling
with windows up high . . . like a cathedral but not ornate . . . tiers of
seats . . . and there's a lot of smaller [Beings] now!"

Each woman recalled seeing Beings.

Jennifer: "I see something moving, but I don't know what it is. . . . It has
arms and legs . . . they have one-color suits; the hands or gloves ... are
white. ..."

Susan: "I don't really see clothing. It looks like everything molds to-
gether. . . . They're not naked . . . off -whitish. . . .""

Each woman similarly described the Beings' bodies and heads as those
of pale Small Grays. They both similarly described how the Beings moved.

Jennifer: "Those things move around — almost like a floating ac-
tion . . . but a controlled weightlessness — like, like they glide . . . they just
glide!"

Susan: "They slide . . . very smooth and graceful." 20

Both women similarly recalled the Beings' eyes, noses, and mouths.

Jennifer: "The eyes are kinda big but they don't look like our eyes,
black . . . elongated on each side — but narrowing down . . . smaller,
going toward the ears. . . . It's wider toward the middle, and then it nar-
rows down . . . almost like teardrops. . . . The bulbous area (nearest the
nose) — kind of narrows down toward the outside . . . dark ... all one
color."

Susan: "It has huge eyes. They are really dark . . . huge eyes . . .
slanted eyes. No eyelids . . . don't blink . . . real intense. Huge and
slanted — real slanted — they stand out in contrast to the white
(face). . . . The eyes are enormous and take over the face. . . ."

84 CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

Jennifer: "I see a space between the two eyes . . . but not a nose like our
noses. Kind of smooth-like ... no nose form per se . . . kind of a curved
smooth area. . . ."

Susan: "No, not a nose . . . the eyes predominate the face. . . . The nose
is flat as if it isn't even there."

Jennifer: "I don't see mouths like ours at all. It looks almost mechani-
cal ... I don't see it open."

Susan: "I don't see tongues and teeth — the mouth doesn't open at all ... I
don't see them using their mouth!" 21

They gave similar descriptions of the Beings' hands and fingers.

Jennifer: "The hands or gloves are white . . . looks like about three or
four fingers — all white. . . . They're long fingers . . . seems like four long
fingers."

Susan: "The fingers are real long . . . and they're slender . . . they are
more adaptable, more flexible. . . . They're not soft — they're, uh, like
bony-hard." 22

Both women described the Beings as having no hair. They similarly de-
scribed being reassured and calmed both telepathically and by touch.

Jennifer: "It's as if they were assuring us ... we should not be afraid.
They're not going to hurt us."

Susan: "They seem to be communicating . . . that they mean us no
harm. ... I don't think they talked. I know they're communicating. They
don't say anything. It's not coming out of their mouth. I don't know if they
even have a mouth! I feelxhtm communicating."

Jennifer: "They came over and patted my hand. Thatm3.de. me feel com-
fortable. ... I feel warmth going into my hands. . . ."

Susan: "They try to calm me . . '. somebody keeps rubbing my head —
with those hands. They pass this hand over Jennifer's forehead
area . . . which seems to either calm her or sedate her." 23

Jennifer is placed on the examining table; she cannot see Susan from
where she is, but Susan can see her.

Susan: "[Jennifer is] lying on a table — covered with some white type of
material ... a narrow table."

Jennifer: "I — I don't see her [Susan]. I think I'm looking around for
Susan — and I just don't see her at all."

At the Conference

Susan (in response to Carpenter's question "Can Jennifer see you from
where she is lying?"): "I don't think so. I'm sitting [in] . . . looks like a
lawnchair — white metal?"

Jennifer (while on the table): "These figures are — one's moving around
over here. The others — one's on my right . . . one's kind of like over
here — in the back a little bit, and one is over on the left a little bit. ... I
can see them coming forward and looking down at me. . . ."

Susan: "It seems like there was somebody with this instrument-looking
thing. Then there was — behind Jennifer's head — there was like three peo-
ple standing there . . . behind her head." 24

With the "preparation" stage of the examination completed, the exam
moves forward into its second stage, the "manual" phase. Both women see
some sort of preoccupation with Jennifer's fingers and hands. Jennifer re-
calls some form of electrodes/ wires attached to her fingers. Both witnesses
recall computerlike panels with blinking lights, etc., and Jennifer's ankles
held by some sort of restraints.

Jennifer: "Something's around my ankles like a strap — but not to tie me
down. It's a strap. It's like something goes completely around each ankle."

Susan: "There are these little, um, they look like, um, stirrups . . .
they're at the end of the table and her legs can just like kind of fit in
them . . . maybe so she won't kick. Her feet are in these things." 25

According to Bullard's model, the medical-examination scenario might
then include "specimen taking," during which samples might be taken of
blood, sperm, eggs, or hair, followed by a "reproductive exam," in which the
sexual organs might be probed or examined. Neither Jennifer nor Susan re-
ported or recalled any such activities taking place. However, Bullard's model
scenario's next stage did take place: while Jennifer appeared sedated, Susan
clearly observed the implantation of a tiny object up Jennifer's nostril with
a dental-pick-like device. Jennifer reported severe nosebleeds afterwards.

Susan: "She's real quiet — she's not moving — I don't know if they use
some anesthesia (Being had passed hand over Jennifer's forehead) . . .
some kind of operation. . . . They have some type of implant thing . . .
put it in the left side of her nose . . . looks like one of those things a den-
tist uses — a pick or something. ... I think it was some type of opera-
tion. . . . She's been having her nose bleeding. When they are finished,
they help her sit up. She's coughing or bleeding or something." 26

According to Bullard's model sequence, following the completion of the
physical examination, a "conference" period would then take place. But,

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

Carpenter noted, both Jennifer and Susan reported that most of the tele-
pathic messages actually occurred during Jennifer's exam. Jennifer did hear
some noises apparently originating from the vicinity of the Beings.

Jennifer: "I think I asked, 'What are you doing to me?' — that they
need to have more information about what my chemistry is all
about. . . . Something was being energized through my system when
they were taking all these tests, taking information from me — from my
body chemistry."

Susan: "They're working for the advancement . . . something about ge-
netic coding . . . within beings. . . . Many beings have particular genetic
codings that allow for our cooperation in what they're doing . . . some-
thing that has been in us since our conception . . . something that we al-
lowed. ... It was a collective agreement . . . from other planes, other
levels of existence. It was an agreement we had before our birth . . . and it
is for the advancement of the species and the advancement of planet
Earth. ... It seems like they have this information that is transferred tele-
pathically, working with us and through us! There is a telepathic link.
They can work with us telepathically, now. . . ," 27

Both women recalled then being taken to at least two of the craft's
rooms, which they remembered distinctly and in considerable detail — in-
cluding, Carpenter points out, a memorable window view of an "inky-blue"
celestial object.

In keeping with the familiar scenario, the women were then returned to
Earth.

Jennifer: "It's as if we're just kind of descending . . . we're floating
through the sky . . . then gently come down to earth."

Susan: "One of the aliens does something with his hand — a movement
with his hands . . . and we seem to be on our way back to the car ... we
don't fall . . . come back faster."

Jennifer: "They let us out to the right of the car. It was close to the car —
just about where we saw the cone [of light] to begin with. . . ."

Susan: "Two came with us. Two . . . and we get back into the
car. . . . They are like seeing that we get into the car. ..."

Jennifer: "Seemed like [I started to forget] once we got in — back in the
car — like a dream, it disappeared. . . . Oh, it seems reaL'l — I was somewhere
I've never been before — nor have I ever seen anything like this before!"

Susan: "They are seeing that we get in the car. . . . They put their hands
over — wave their hands over our foreheads, and we don't remember." 28

At the Conference

In the final stage of Bullard's model scenario the abductee may suffer or
notice physical effects, vague or unexplained anxiety, phobic responses,
nightmares, flashbacks, insomnia, changes in personality — sometimes pur-
suing new interests or more satisfying work. Also, other UFO experiences
may be reported, along with the remembrance of earlier incidents in one's
life. An awareness may occur that other family members are involved, per-
haps triggering recollections from them that they may have kept hidden or
discounted for years.

"Susan," Carpenter reported, "experienced anxiety, restlessness, and ex-
haustion while Jennifer had nosebleeds, insomnia and red, flushed cheeks.
After the amnesia was dissolved, Susan spent the next year changing jobs
and pursuing new satisfying interests." (You will recall that Susan, now
"Star," became a massage therapist.)

"During Susan's hypnosis she recalled an incident just three weeks ear-
lier," Carpenter's report continued. "During the twelve months that fol-
lowed the November 7 encounter, both women reported further incidents.
Susan's daughter explored a peculiar bedroom memory under hypnosis with
this author and uncovered a remarkably detailed experience matching the
'abduction scenario.' " 29

The significance of this case, according to Carpenter, is that "two ma-
ture, highly credible women — apparently unfamiliar with any UFO-related
data — reported a UFO encounter within 100 feet of their car. Neither
woman," Carpenter continued,

could consciously account for nearly two hours of time. Both adamantly
claimed independently that they never left their car or saw anything else.
Separate hypnosis sessions released two elaborate stories that produced
many similar details of an abduction aboard an alien craft. At least 40 cor-
relations could be found among descriptions of the creatures, craft inte-
rior, behaviors, procedures, and general scenario. Not only did the details
match each other between their accounts but other details echoed both
published and unpublished research data. 30

In 1990, a year after her experience, Star, at Carpenter's request, ad-
dressed a large gathering of people interested in exploring the phenomenon.
"UFOs were not in my consciousness," she told them. "It's not that I was a
complete skeptic, it's just that it was nothing that ever interested me. I
wasn't into UFOs! And since I've had the experience, I've had so many peo-
ple say to me that they wish it had happened to them. And my response is,
'Then why did it happen to me?'

"I was never interested in it," Star continued. "I never read a book. It's
like a year ago I had tunnel vision. It's almost like I lived in a little box. So

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

when people are skeptical of the UFO phenomenon, I understand! I was
there! I know exactly where they're coming from. But it is a type of tunnel
vision. It might actually cause you to break out of your preconceived ideas
about who we are and where we're going and what we're all about if you
allow for anything other than what you can see, touch, and feel on this
planet. I can honestly say that, because I have grown from it. I think that I
am a much better person for having had my little world shattered — and for
opening up new possibilities of what this life might be all about." 31

Following Carpenter's presentation, the conference breaks for lunch.

In his commentary published with the results of the Roper Poll, John Car-
penter compared the difficulty the outside community has with accepting
that there might be anything to these abduction reports with the initial
doubt and disbelief with which the first reports of family incest and child
sexual abuse were received until, he wrote, "the growing number of reports
finally forced the consideration of these issues by the mental health com-
munity." 32 Another parallel might be the skepticism with which the first re-
ports of the Epstein-Barr syndrome (chronic fatigue) were greeted.

"Scattered psychological testing all over the United States seems to
support the clinical impressions that the vast majority reporting UFO ab-
duction experiences are basically healthy and free of psychopathology,"
Carpenter wrote. "Creativity and confabulation," his commentary con-
tinued,

would produce a wide variety of individualized scenarios and details, re-
flecting one's unique background. Similarly, dreams may be alike in gen-
eral themes but quite different in their specific details, characteristic of the
individual and his life situations. Data collected from many researchers
produce striking similarity in abduction theme, procedure, behavior,
bizarreness, order of events, etc. Significant correlations are being found
among written symbols observed, insignias on uniforms, anatomical de-
tail, and other small and precise details which remain unpublished and,
therefore, unavailable to the public. 33

The question arises as to whether individuals might subconsciously de-
velop similar abduction scenarios through their exposure to publications,
movies, or television shows and documentaries. But, as Carpenter points
out, a great many of the "abductees" had no prior exposure to abduction-
related stories and no prior interest in the subject whatsoever. "Most would
tell you," Carpenter wrote, "they have been quite happy in their lives and
did worwant this unexpected intrusion. When simple folks from rural areas

At the Conference

with no television, and small children who cannot read, begin to recite the
same familiar abduction scenario, how can one account for the supposed
media influence?" 34

The question also arises as to what role hypnosis or the hypnotist him-
self might play in influencing the outcome. But, as Carpenter reports,
nearly one-fourth of all UFO abduction cases are consciously recalled
without the use of hypnosis, and yet these accounts "correlate just as well
as with those experiences retrieved from amnesiac period." Carpenter ad-
mits he has deliberately attempted to "lead individuals with direct hyp-
notic suggestions into sensible and credible directions but find consistent
resistance to follow my lead. Instead, the person relates his/her own bizarre
experience which then matches the accounts of others without the subject
even realizing this." 35

Information gained through the aid of hypnosis is certainly question-
able and controversial in court cases, Carpenter tells us; but hypnosis does
seem to pierce the amnesiac barrier in abduction victims and can bring
them genuine relief.

There yet remains, however, the nagging worry that these abduction ac-
counts might be hoaxes. But, as Carpenter has pointed out, fewer than 5
percent of all UFO reports have been statistically documented as hoaxes.
And he asks the telling questions "What purpose is there to a hoax if the in-
dividual is fearful of telling others and avoidant of publicity? How could a
farmer in Kansas construct the exact same lies as a businessman in New York
or an artist in Paris? And for what obscure purpose?" 36

It is clear that among the abductees I have spoken with here at the
M.I.T. conference, the last thing in the world they seem to want is any
form of publicity. They absolutely do not want their names to be made
public. What they do want is to be taken seriously, and they want someone
to help them understand and make sense of what they believe is happen-
ing to them.

I have lunch that Monday afternoon with Carol and Alice. We are talking
in general terms about the conference, and Alice is saying, "I'm still trying
to approach this thing in a very rational, logical — as much as it can be ra-
tional and logical — way. Trying to detect some patterns to this, trying to
find out what's going on."

"A lot of what we thought were childhood memories, for instance, we
had forced into little boxes," Carol explains. "And we'd held on to that until
little by little, as this conference has drawn on, those things have been taken
out of the boxes and thrown away."

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

"Like what?" I asked her.

"The scars are part of it," Carol says. "The man with the cowboy hat.
That was my last holdout. The man with the four-foot Stetson."
"What man in a four-foot Stetson?" I asked.

"It's a long story," Carol says, and emits a harsh little bark of laughter.
"It's a Being Carol saw," Alice explains.

"I didn't tell everything in last night's presentation," Carol says. "But
last March 8 I had this weird experience with what at first I thought was a
naked man in a four-foot Stetson hat. And this morning I was sitting on the
bench outside during the coffee break — Alice was right next to me, and on
the other side was one of the therapists, Joe Nyman. I asked Joe if he had
ever heard of an incident where an encounter was with a Tall Gray Being,
big, I mean six feet or so, wearing a cowboy hat. And he goes, 'Oh, yeah. A
man with a big cowboy hat, a big Stetson? Oh yeah, we've had those.' And
he said there were different kinds of costumes — "

"The clown, for kids," Alice interjects.

"Right," Carol says. "Orange hair for kids so the kids would think
they were talking to a clown. And we heard at this conference from our
own investigator about a new experiencer who had a similar man with a
cowboy hat."

Carol and Alice begin talking about childhood memories, the odd little
bits and pieces they had retained which had returned as flashbacks. Carol
tells me about the flashback that had occurred during her presentation at
the conference the night before: the memory of being a child frantically try-
ing to keep the bright light from entering the closet. "The only reason I
knew I was a child and approximately how old I was was because I knew
that house I was in. So at least I could place it in a time period."

"But what's so frustrating about one of Carol's flashbacks," Alice says,
"is that it's all in bits and pieces. It's just one little piece with nothing to con-
nect it to."

"There's no one else there in the flashback I can recognize: 'That's so-
and-so, it happened at such-and-such,' " Carol says. She is gazing through
the restaurant window at the street outside. "It's like looking at a parking
meter in space," she says, "just one parking meter, and based on that park-
ing meter you're trying to reconstruct in your memory the city block sur-
rounding it."

"And sometimes," Alice adds, "you don't even know what city it was in."

The first speaker after lunch is Budd Hopkins, whose presentation, "A Dou-
bly Witnessed Abduction," is the account of a woman he calls Linda Cor-

At the Conference

tile, who was abducted from her New York City apartment at 3:15 in the
morning in late November 1989. It is the episode he alluded to yesterday at
breakfast.

"Accompanied by three aliens," Hopkins reports, "Linda was floated
out of a window twelve stories above the ground, then up into a hovering
UFO. The event was witnessed by two security agents and the senior polit-
ical figure they were guarding, as well as by a woman driving across the
Brooklyn Bridge.

"The importance of this case is virtually immeasurable," Hopkins points
out, "as it powerfully supports both the objective reality of UFO abductions
and the accuracy of regressive hypnosis as employed with this abductee."

According to Hopkins, the two security men were driving the political
official along South Street near the Brooklyn Bridge beneath the FDR Drive
in Manhattan when their car's electrical system inexplicably cut out and
they coasted to a stop. They could detect a reddish-orange glow through
their car's windshield. At first, the security agent Hopkins calls Dan thought
the glow was the rising sun; but almost immediately he realized he was fac-
ing not east but due west. Peering up through the windshield, Dan and his
partner, "Richard," saw a fifty-foot-wide, oval-shaped object with rotating
colored lights hovering above a fifteen-story apartment building at the street
corner about five hundred feet ahead.

Richard pulled a pair of binoculars out of the car's glove compartment,
and, as he watched, the craft — now making a barely audible low humming
sound — descended until it was level with the top of the apartment build-
ing. All sound then stopped. A bright beam of blue-white light shot out
from the bottom of the craft, and then, to the horror of the three men in
the car, they saw a woman in a white nightgown float out of a window on
the apartment building's twelfth floor, accompanied by three small creatures
with big heads.

"My God!" Dan cried. "We've got to stop them!"

"How are we going to do that?" Richard asked. "Shoot them?"

The woman, escorted by the three Small Beings, hovered briefly in
midair; they then ascended the blue-white beam of light and disappeared
through an opening in the bottom of the spacecraft. A moment later, the
light flickered out; the disc again emitted a reddish-orange glow, rose slowly
upwards, then passed over the FDR Drive and the Brooklyn Bridge and
dove into the East River, presumably carrying Linda Cortile within it!

My immediate impulse upon hearing this story is to laugh, to make
jokes about it, to turn it into one of Bob Newhart's old comedy routines:
"Now, let me see if I've got this straight, Mrs. Cortile. First you were floated
by three small gray Beings through your window ... then up a beam of

92 CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

light and into a ... I see, a hovering alien spacecraft. . . . Uh-huh. . . . And
in this spacecraft these beings did what? . . . They stole your eggs? Uh, why
do you think they would want to do a thing like that, Mrs. Cortile? . . . Uh-
huh, I see. Because they wanted to breed vtith you." But there is nothing
funny about this story to Linda Cortile.

At the time of this abduction Linda was already seeing Budd Hopkins.
She had initially contacted him seven months earlier, in April 1989, after
reading his book Intruders, in which he described a woman abductee,
"Kathy Davis," who had had some mysterious nose surgery and suspected
that the Beings had implanted some sort of device there. Linda, too, be-
lieved she had had surgery in her nose she could not account for. For four-
teen years she had carried a scar high up inside her nose, a scar positively
identified by a doctor she had consulted as being a scalpel cut. But neither
she nor her family had any memory of Linda having had any operations
other than one for an impacted wisdom tooth and, several years later, an
episiotomy following the birth of her first son.

In addition to the inexplicable nose surgery, there were strange, frag-
mentary memories of episodes that had taken place when Linda was a child
and, later, a twenty-year-old. And so when Linda went to consult Hopkins,
she assumed that together they would just look into these previous experi-
ences. She was now, after all, a married woman in her early forties with two
children, and nothing had happened for years.

The morning after the abduction, however, she awoke with conscious
memories of the onset of paralysis the night before and the presence of
Small Gray Beings in her bedroom. She recalled having cried out to her hus-
band in bed beside her to wake up, but he wouldn't or couldn't. And then
her memory ceased. She immediately telephoned Budd Hopkins, telling
him, "I think something happened last night."

Three days later, Hopkins did a hypnotic regression session with Linda,
and the abduction story emerged. With the aid of hypnosis she was able to
recall how the Beings had led her from her bedroom, which overlooked her
building's courtyard, to the living room, whose window looked out onto the
street and beyond to a tiny strip of the East River. She then remembered
being floated out of that window and up into the awaiting craft.

It wasn't until fourteen months later, in February 1991, that Hopkins
heard for the first time from Richard, who, along with Dan and the senior
political figure they were guarding, had witnessed Linda's abduction from
their stalled car.

"Please respect our credibility at work," Richard wrote Hopkins. "We
cannot let our identities be made public." He expressed his shock at what
he had seen, adding, "This whole situation flies in the face of everything I've

At the Conference

believed or knew about." He wrote of the stages of anger, fear, and embar-
rassment he had passed through. "The manner they took her drove us nuts!
What could we do to help her? Who was she? Was she one of them?"

Hopkins thought Richard's question "Was sh» one of them?" a particu-
larly interesting reaction. "It's a measure of how much they pushed the
whole thing away," he later told me, "to assume — at least on one level — that
maybe she's one of them. It's almost as if they're saying, 'I don't want to
think she's a human being and we should have done something.' It's easier
to think of her as part of the whole business."

The agents, of course, had no way of knowing that Hopkins was already
aware of the abduction and that the woman they had seen was Linda Cor-
tile. Hopkins immediately warned Linda that the men might visit her and
that if they did so, she was not to share with them any details whatsoever of
what she remembered. She was instead to tell them that it was extremely im-
portant they contact Hopkins himself. "At the very least/' he told Linda,
"try to get them to record a statement."

Hopkins's purpose was to acquire independent, uncontaminated con-
firmation of the details of the incident.

Not long afterwards Dan and Richard, identifying themselves as police
officers, did visit Linda at her apartment.

Dan, who had been staring at Linda, sat down on the couch. "My
God," he said, putting his head in his hands, "it's really her!"

"Thank God you're alive," Richard said as he embraced Linda. He had
tears in his eyes. "We couldn't do anything to help you."

They told Linda how they had witnessed through binoculars what had
happened.

If seeing Linda in person unsettled the security agents, hearing them
confirm the details of her abduction had an even more devastating effect on
Linda herself.

Several months after the M.I.T. conference, I was able to meet Linda at
Budd Hopkins's New York studio. Leaning against the white wall of the
stairway down into Hopkins's studio is Mahler's Castle, a large three-panel
painting he completed in 1972. The more Hopkins looked at this painting,
the more he was struck that what he had created was not a castle but a tem-
ple; and eventually he was doing a whole series of temple, altar, and guardian
sculptures and paintings. Several of the guardian pieces, brightly lit by track
spots, were displayed on the studio's plain white brick walls. Opposite the
paintings was a cozy nook containing a soft couch covered in a black fabric.
Books and periodicals spilled out of a series of shelves framing the couch.
Linda Cortile, a small woman, was seated when I arrived. I told her I
thought her story was "astonishing."

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

Linda speaks with a Brooklyn accent. "This stuff is hard to swallow," she i
said with a faint smile. "I used to be one of those people who would sit on ,
my couch and watch other abductees like myself on TV and laugh at them!" ]

"Because you didn't want to believe it?"

"I put a lot of effort into disbelieving this!" she said. "I couldn't believe
this was happening."

"What did you think was?" I asked.

"Well, when I was a child we thought there were ghosts in the house.
We didn't really believe in ghosts, but things were walking through our
apartment. At one point my mother said they came right through the walls!
So what else could they be? My mother had the priest come every two weeks
to bless the house. He'd walk around with his cross and holy water, and it
didn't help! And then finally I was married and moved out of the house —
and it kept happening anyway! I was in a different apartment in a different
borough, and it was still happening!"

I asked Linda how much conscious recollection she had of the wit-
nessed abduction.

"I remember getting into bed for the night," she said. "It was about
three in the morning. I couldn't have been in bed more than five minutes
when I felt a presence in my room. I wasn't asleep. I had just shut my eyes
and I felt there was someone in our bedroom besides my husband and my-
self; and then I started to feel a numbness going from my toes up."

"Is this different from the numbness one normally feels as one falls
asleep?"

"Absolutely," she said. "You know when you hit your funnybone and
you get that tingly sensation up your arm? Well, that's what it feels like, only
you can't move! Or when your leg falls asleep and it feels so heavy? But at
least you can lift your leg and bang it so it wakes up? Well, the difference is
you can't do that. You can't lift your legs."

"Are you sure that your memories emerging through hypnosis are real
memories?" I asked. "Is there any way that these memories could be being
manufactured by Budd?"

"When I saw those creatures in my room in November 1989, I was
awake, I wasn't asleep," Linda said firmly. "I wasn't in any twilight sleep. I
hadn't been sleeping yet. And I saw them with my own eyes. They were in
my room! And not only did it scare the hell out of me, it confirmed that
what I had been seeing under hypnosis was no dream!"

"But didn't your husband in bed beside you see them?"

"He wouldn't wake up! He wouldn't wake up no matter what I did! See,
my husband snores real loud — sometimes to the point I can't sleep and I'll
sleep on the sofa bed in the living room and I'll shut the bedroom door and

At the Conference

I'll still be able to hear him. So it was pretty unusual that I couldn't wake
him up and that he wasn't snoring, either. I knew something was wrong.
That paralysis was coming, from my toes up. It was dead quiet, And when
I opened my eyes and saw those creatures, I knew immediately what they
were; I recognized them from hypnosis.

"It wasn't just what I saw that bothered me," Linda continued, "it was
the confirmation of what I was seeing under hypnosis! And I didn't want to
believe this was happening to me, but it was. This wasn't hypnosis; this
wasn't a dream; I wasn't sleeping. I saw those creatures with my own eyes this
time. They exist! So what happens to the skepticism you used to have?" she
asked. "What do you do with it? I mean, now you're sort of just hanging by
a hair of skepticism instead of a rope! So I was saying to myself, 'Maybe I'm
crazy. Maybe I'm just seeing things.' But that was the hair, you know?

"I mean, it's better to be crazy, to be mentally ill, because there's treat-
ment for it," Linda explained. "There's a possibility it's going to be cured.
But with this alien-abduction stuff, it doesn't stop. You can't stop it. So after
November 1989, 1 was just trying to get over the fact that I had seen these
things. I had accepted the possibility that I was crazy because I was still
hanging on to that little hair of skepticism. And then," Linda said, "in Feb-
ruary 1991, Budd received that first letter from that security agent, Richard,
and . . . well, the hair broke."

Since that first communication from Richard, Hopkins has received
numerous letters, tape-recorded statements, and drawings from the two se-
curity agents attesting to what they saw, plus confirmation from the "senior
political figure."

After that meeting with Linda the agents started spying on her. "We
watch her not to feel crazy," Richard wrote Hopkins. "When I see her, I
tremble. It's real. The whole situation is real. It wasn't 'interesting' or 'excit-
ing,' I thought it was terrifying."

In July 1991, five months after Richard had initially contacted Budd Hop-
kins, Hopkins received a letter from a sixty-year-old upstate New\ York
woman who had been driving across the Brooklyn Bridge toward Manhattan
at 3:15 that same November morning. Suddenly the lights on the Brooklyn
Bridge had flickered and gone out and the electrical systems in her car and
the few other cars about her malfunctioned and the cars coasted to a stop.

Ahead, clearly visible from where she was stalled on the bridge, was an
orange-red disc hovering over Linda Cortile's building. The woman saw the
disc's color change and the blue-white light shine down upon the side of
Linda's apartment building.

"My God!" a woman in a car behind her screamed. "There are people
floating in the air!"

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

In her letter to Hopkins the upstate New York woman explained that
the reason she had decided to contact him was that two months earlier, in
May, she had watched a CBS television show called Visitors from the Un-
known, an abduction story. "From that evening on," she wrote Hopkins, "I
thought about what I saw in New York City about a year and half ago. I
spoke about it only once," her letter continued,

and was made to feel ridiculous. I've never spoken of it again. In fact, I've
never travelled back to New York City after what I saw and I never will
again for any reason. ... I do wish to remain anonymous. My family and
friends do not take too kindly to the UFO subject. I have firsthand expe-
rience and I refuse to be made into a fool. It has taken me two months to
build up the courage to write you this letter and draw the enclosed draw-
ings. I don't want to be involved with these unnatural goings on; however,
I must know if you know what's going on in New York City and if it hap-
pens often.

One evening [and here she gives the date of Linda's abduction] I at-
tended a retirement party in Brooklyn for my sickly boss. Unfortunately,
she has since passed away. The party lasted until the early hours of the next
morning. My boss invited me to stay at her house for the night, but I was
anxious to get home. I drove to the Brooklyn Bridge with the intention of
crossing over to the Manhattan side.

Words can't express what I saw that morning up on the bridge. I can't
begin to explain it verbally. You would have had to have seen it yourself.
Enclosed you will find three drawings. After you finish looking through
this little package I've managed to send you, you may think I'm crazy. If I
am, so were those other people sitting in their cars up there on the bridge
with me that morning. If you don't think I'm crazy and if you have ques-
tions I can only say / saw! And I know what I saw!

Drawing i shows the orange-red disc above Linda's building and the
blue-white light shining down on the building's side. "I saw a building on
fire; I was shocked to see what it really was!" the woman wrote. "The lights
were so bright I had to shield my eyes. I was frightened and found this air-
craft very threatening."

Drawing 2 shows the position and posture of Linda and the three Be-
ings as they first appeared. "They came out of a window one right after an-
other. There were six windows on that side of the building. I purposely
counted them. It was from the second window on the left. There was
enough light for thousands of people to see what was happening. I'll bet you,
dollars to doughnuts that thousands did see what happened from other
areas of the city. The things that came out the window, I didn't know what
they were. . . ."

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Drawing } shows the position and posture of Linda and the three Be-
ings as they ascended into the disc.

As they rise up to the spacecraft. I didn't want to look. I was petrified, but
something made me look. It wasn't until then that I realized there were
four children standing up in mid-air. Yes, in mid-air! While I watched I
could hear the screams of people parked in the cars behind me. Their
screams were from horror. Please excuse the stick figures I drew in this
drawing, but this is honestly how I saw three of the children. It was obvi-
ous that these three children were rickets-stricken. Their heads were so
large in comparison with the normal girl-child standing in the air with
them. I don't know what gender the three sickly children were, but I could
see that the normal child was a girl child because she was wearing a
white . . . nightgown. She was taller than the others. Perhaps she was a lit-
tle bit older. Their next movement was when they all moved up closer to
the craft, then they quickly whisked straight up into the object, under-
neath it, and disappeared.

The aircraft quickly rose up above the building and flew away at a
very high speed. It flew behind the building drawn on the right. It passed
over a highway or drive below, then proceeded to climb higher over the
center of the bridge. I was parked more towards the Manhattan side. I
watched in horror. I don't know where it went from there because I had
to look up to see but there's a bridge platform above and I couldn't see any-
more. I do know that when this aircraft passed over the bridge my cloth-
ing clung to me and my body hair stood up. The clinging sensation went
away after the object went away and my car started up again.

Since the woman had not securely closed her car door, the first thing
that happened after the disc had passed overhead was that the car's dome
light suddenly came back on, startling her.

She concluded her letter to Hopkins writing:

Mr. Hopkins, I wanted to talk to these people parked behind me; I was very
shaken up. I could have used some calming down, but they were much too
upset themselves and I couldn't communicate with them. Some of them
were running around their cars with their hands on their heads yelling!

Are you aware of what is going on in that dreadful city? Is anyone
putting a stop to this?

Hopkins immediately contacted the woman and carried out detailed
personal interviews with her. In order to evaluate her effectiveness as a wit-
ness he would deliberately get the sequence of some of the events wrong, or
try to lead her into altering her descriptions, but she wouldn't change her
story. She insisted upon what she had seen.

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

According to Hopkins, the details in the woman's letter and drawings,
as well as those that later emerged during his interviews with her, matched
exactly those particulars given by the men in the car stalled on South Street
and by Linda herself. As Hopkins later told me, "There is absolutely no
doubt in my mind that this woman saw what she saw. There just isn't!"

As if this witness's confirmation of Linda Cortile's abduction story were
not bizarre enough, there is this additional corroboration: an entirely sepa-
rate abduction incident evidently took place that same night at that same
hour farther uptown in Manhattan, and a second woman abductee report-
edly witnessed a reddish-orange disc flying down the East River from
roughly where Linda Cortile's apartment and the Brooklyn Bridge stand.

Hopkins's presentation of the Linda Cortile story at the M.I.T confer-
ence does not make the sort of stir I would expect. I later learn that this was
not the first time most of them had heard the story.

John Miller, the soft-spoken Los Angeles-area emergency physician, rises
next to speak on the "Lack of Proof for the Missing Embryo/Fetus Syn-
drome (ME/FS)."

Although ME/FS is a phenomenon widely reported by both Budd
Hopkins and David Jacobs in their books, Miller is not convinced it exists.
Jacobs, for example, writes in Secret Life:

The problem of unplanned or inexplicable pregnancy is one of the most
frequent physical after-effects of abduction experiences. Usually the
woman feels pregnant and has all the outward signs of being pregnant.
She is puzzled and disturbed because she has either not engaged in sex or
has been very careful with proper birth control. She has blood tests and
the gynecologist positively verifies the pregnancy. Typically, between the
discovery of the pregnancy and the end of the first trimester, the woman
suddenly finds herself not pregnant. She has no miscarriage, no extra-
heavy bleeding or discharge. The fetus is simply gone, with no evidence
of the rare phenomenon of non-twin "absorption," in which physicians
theorize that a nonviable fetus can be absorbed into the woman's body.

During the first trimester the woman may decide to terminate the
pregnancy. At the appointment, the physician begins the procedure and is
stunned to find that there is no fetus in the uterus. . . . The "Missing Fetus
Syndrome" has happened to abductees enough times that it is now con-
sidered one of the more common effects of the abduction experience. 37

"Missing embryo and/or fetus syndrome (ME/FS) stories now seem
to be reported frequently by female abductees," Miller begins. "By now

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we should have some medically well-documented cases of this, but we
don't. Proof of a case of ME/FS has proved entirely elusive." Miller points
out that any ME/FS case that is not based on medical records cannot be
considered "proven" and suggests that although obtaining medical records
may be considered a "formidable obstacle" to non-M.D. investigators, it
really isn't all that difficult if the patient will sign a consent for her records'
release.

"The problems of proving a case of ME/FS go far beyond mere lack
of medical records," Miller says. "Although a witness may sincerely believe
that she has experienced ME/FS, there is ample opportunity for confu-
sion, especially in cases of pregnancy that 'disappear' in the first twelve to
sixteen weeks."

Miller places a transparency upon the projector:

Medical Causes for Apparent Disappearing Pregnancies

1. Blighted Ovum

2. Spontaneous Abortion (Miscarriage)

3. Missed Abortion

4. Hydatidiform Mole

5. Secondary Amenorrhea

6. Pseudocyesis (False Pregnancy)

"Items 1, 2, and 3 are very common," Miller says. "I see all of them in
my emergency department on a virtually daily basis. Items 4, 5, and 6 are
not as frequently seen."

Miller explains that a "blighted ovum" is a pregnancy in which an em-
bryo has degenerated or been absent from the start. But since placental tis-
sue secretes the beta-hCG hormone assayed when a modern urine or blood
test for pregnancy is performed, "a positive pregnancy test," Miller points
out, "does not in and of itself mean that a fetus is, or ever was, present."

When the products of a spontaneous abortion, or miscarriage, are ex-
amined, an embryo or fetus is very often absent; therefore, Miller explains,
"it is not mysterious to find no fetus in this material," either.

As for a "missed abortion," the term used, Miller tells us, "when a preg-
nancy dies but is not aborted, it is unclear why some nonviable pregnancies
do not progress to spontaneous abortion, but some cases of missed pregnancy
can be carried five months or longer. Thus, it is possible to have a 'pregnancy'
of more than five months' duration but ultimately have a 'missing fetus.' "
Therefore, Miller reports, there is nothing mysterious about the absence of a
fetus in cases involving an abortion or miscarriage of a pregnancy that because

100 CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

of abnormal development lasted many months. There may be nothing mys-
terious to Dr. Miller, but I can't help wondering if there's no spontaneous
abortion and the "pregnancy" continues, what's happened to the fetus?

There's no time to ask. Miller is already explaining that with a "hy-
datidform mole" which occurs in perhaps one of out fifteen hundred preg-
nancies, a fertilized egg degenerates for unknown reasons into a rapidly
growing mass of grape-like tissue that also secretes the beta-hCG hormone.
"Thus a witness could report a positive pregnancy test and an enlarging
uterus," Miller points out, "but only 'abnormal' tissue is found by doctors."
In other words, a "missing fetus."

"Secondary amenorrhea" is the medical term for a woman not having
her period for six months or more due to a number of possible medical
causes other than pregnancy. "Milder, self-limited forms of this problem,"
Miller notes, "are extremely common. It is well known that a woman may
miss several cycles for a variety of known or unknown reasons. . . . She
could miss four or five periods without any anomalous forces at work."

"Pseudocyesis," or false pregnancy, occurs in about one in five thousand
general-obstetrics cases. "The patient may have all of the presumptive signs
of pregnancy including a 'full term'-appearing abdomen," Miller explains,
"but with a small uterus and a negative pregnancy test. These patients fre-
quently assume all features of the expectant-mother role and are bitterly dis-
appointed when no baby ensues. The patient will often stubbornly,
illogically insist she is, or was, pregnant despite being presented with the
strongest possible evidence to the contrary.

"Of course," Miller continues, "none of these medical causes for appar-
ent disappearing pregnancies account for the UFO/alien complaints that
seem narrowly specific and fairly consistent from case to case in the missing
fetus and/or embryo syndrome. But so far, these cases of alleged ME/FS
have a will-o'-the-wisp quality to them."

Miller tells of a case he is reviewing in which a seven-month fetus al-
legedly disappeared overnight — "a startling event," he calls it. But based on
the medical records he has obtained, it appears that this was a case of false
pregnancy.

"So what would it take to prove an alleged missing embryo and/or fetus
syndrome case to be genuinely anomalous?" Miller asks. The answer, he tells
us, would entail interviews with a witness to establish her credibility; access
to, and a review of, the patient's complete medical records, records of rea-
sonable quality generated by practitioners of recognized competence; and,
with the witness's permission, interviews with the physician or physicians
involved. If the case should then still appear to be truly anomalous, Miller
suggests, the final stage should be a review of the case by a "non-ufologi-

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101

cally involved board-certified obstetrician and/or gynecologist, who should
be kept blinded to any attendant ufologic allegations in the case to avoid the
possibility of the introduction of bias into any opinion rendered." This,
Miller adds, would of course eliminate a physician such as himself from tak-
ing part in the final proof process.

"Since we don't feel comfortable advancing a case as truly anomalous
without disinterested third-party expert opinion," Miller says, "it should be
clear that we don't feel that any non-M.D. researcher can successfully claim
to have proven such a case on his own. It is disturbing to see these cases writ-
ten about as some sort of established physical reality."

Miller concludes by stating that in his abstract published in advance of
the conference he called for any attendees with proof of a case of missing
fetus syndrome to bring that proof to the conference, and that although
"this did not happen, some interesting leads requiring further follow-up
were obtained." But the bottom line of Miller's presentation is that no clear
and convincing evidence of the missing fetus syndrome alleged by Dave Ja-
cobs exists.

"Clear and convincing evidence" is, in fact, the bane of this conference.
I am hopeful that Jenny Randies, the next presenter, will provide some,
since according to the program her talk is to be "Abduction Study Where
Entity Was Photographed."

"On December i, 1987," Randies tells us, "a retired police officer ob-
served a figure in a streambed and went after it. . . ."

I am smiling as I take notes. "Retired police officer," "figure in a
streambed": Randies already has the opening of a quintessential British
mystery, which she then tops by adding that the officer paused to photo-
graph the creature just before it "shambled behind a rock outcrop" to its
parked flying saucer. That "shambled" is a nice touch, I think — part Big-
foot, part Quasimodo.

"When the officer got to the outcrop," Randies is saying, "he witnessed
a classic UFO departure. Whereupon he returned to his car."

However, Randies reports, once back in his car, the officer discovered
that (1) his watch was not working, (2) there was a one-and-a-half-hour "dis-
crepancy," or period of missing time, and (3) his compass was 180 degrees
off. He subsequently had his compass examined, and test results indicated
it had been exposed to "a pulse magnetic field." Also tested were the rocks
upon which the saucer had allegedly rested; but here, on the other hand, no
anomaly was found.

Randies puts the photograph on the projector. It is a blurry black-and-
white picture of something thirty yards or so ahead of the photographer in
what we have been told is a streambed. "Three different analyses'of the pho-

102 CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

tograph agree it shows something four and a half feet tall, gray, with a large
head and nonhuman proportions," Randies tells us. "Unfortunately the 400
ASA film used is too grainy to blow up for detail."

Pfui, as Nero Wolfe would say. The quality of the photograph is so poor
it could be anything. It could even be, as the official British government ex-
planation went, "an insurance salesman riding his bicycle." Why is it, with
all the 35 mm auto-focus cameras and hand-held video cameras people now
own, there are still no clear and convincing photographs of UFOs, much less
alien Beings?

During the lunch break I talk with Linda Moulton Howe, a film and televi-
sion documentary maker specializing in topics involving science, medicine,
and the environment. She is, however, attending the conference as a presen-
ter, not as a journalist. I ask her, too, what she really thinks is going on.

"I would have to start with how I got into this in the first place," she
tells me. She explains how in 1979, she had already been the special projects
director at the Denver CBS affiliate for three years, doing a series of docu-
mentaries and live television shows on environmental issues. Prior to com-
ing to Denver she had written and produced a Boston-based syndicated
medical program. Therefore, in September 1979, when reports of strange,
bloodless animal mutilations began to appear in United States, Australian,
and Canadian newspapers — accounts of a steer's ear, eye, or tongue taken,
its genital and rectal tissue excised with cookie-cutter-clean precision, its
jaw stripped of flesh — she was able to approach the story with a journalis-
tic background in both medical and environmental hard-science-related
subjects.

Initially she believed some government agency was taking tissue in this
strange manner to examine it for environmental contamination. But as she
researched the story, as she interviewed both the ranchers upon whose ani-
mals these mutilations had been performed and the law-enforcement offi-
cials to whom these ranchers had reported, environmental contamination
was not what they wanted to talk to her about. They wanted to speak in-
stead of the football-field-sized glowing orange discs they had seen over
their pastures, or the cones of light shining down from something invisible
in the sky onto their field where a mutilated animal would sometimes sub-
sequently be found. And the more she looked into the story, the more she
entered what she refers to as "a hall of mirrors with a quicksand floor."

The day after A Strange Harvest, Linda's television program on the mys-
terious animal mutilations, was broadcast, her Denver television station
logged over three hundred telephone calls before they quit counting. Mail

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103

poured in for Linda, some with drawings; people wrote, "I've never told
anyone about this before, but . . ." and they would recount their own mu-
tilation stories, tell of their own encounters with strange craft and lights.

"And so, in a way — and I know this is a long answer to your question,"
Linda tells me — "I'm still at the end of some of those ripples that started
with that film."

At the same time, Linda was doing documentaries and stories on other
subjects: a Solar Max repair story for MacNeil-Lehrer, several projects for
UNICEF on child-survival efforts in Africa and other places. "I had delib-
erately pulled myself back into this world we have to live in and the prob-
lems it has," Linda tells me. "But there was always this parallel track!

"Everybody here at the conference has the same experience," she ex-
plains. "It's like you're in two worlds. You make a living in what is the nor-
mal social paradigm we live in: the world in which for almost half a century
now the UFO phenomenon has made occasional headlines, there have even
been occasional photographs, and it has received a lot of play in the
tabloids. But it is still a world in which the normal social paradigm has said
the UFO phenomenon doesn't exist.

"But then for those of us who, one way or another, got into this quick-
sand, we come home and enter this other world because there are all these
messages on our telephone answering machine: somebody reporting a cat-
tle mutilation in Kansas, someone else reporting the sighting of a disc over
a pasture. Or you get a call from somebody who woke up with a triangle of
small marks on their leg, some bruises on their arm, and they're troubled
and disconcerted, and suddenly you're in the abduction category. And in
the abduction phenomenon, in spite of the controversy on hypnosis, you do
have eyewitness encounters, broad-daylight eyewitness testimony. A
rancher in Texas, out rounding up some cows, encounters two four-foot-
tall, grayish-green creatures with big, black, slanted eyes carrying a calf. It
scares him to death!" she tells me. "He runs away, comes back three days
later with his wife and one of his sons, and they find the calf mutilated."

"How do you know about this?" I ask.

"I've talked with the son and the rancher!" Linda replies. "Or there's a
husband and wife in Missouri — you can talk to them — who in July 1983
watched two small, white-skinned, silver-suited Beings with a cow down in
a pasture somehow float this cow into some kind of cone-shaped craft and
disappear."

"I could talk to them?" I ask.

"I can give you their names and addresses — these are people who would
talk to you. They shared binoculars and argued over who would get to use
them while they watched this strange event."

1 04

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

"Linda, you have a solid scientific background, and you don't seem off-
the-wall, right?"

"I'm not!" she says, laughing.
"But what you're telling me is!"

"I know. You feel this has to be science fiction! But there are people —
some of them here at this conference, others like the people out in Missouri
and Texas — who've had broad daylight encounters with something that's not
human! But to the paradigm we're living in, it's divided by this invisible line:
it doesn't count. That's the odd thing about this phenomenon," she says.
"We're dealing with the investigation of something which, as long as it is
said it doesn't exist, it takes extraordinary evidence to prove it to anyone.
And that is the dilemma for all us."

"But you're asking for an enormous leap of faith," I say. "If these cattle
mutilations were being done by coyotes, we'd all be wonderfully able to ac-
cept that. But when you're saying that organs are removed without any
blood, that the edges of the incisions are cookie-cutter-smooth, and that lit-
tle gray men with big heads are carrying these cattle up beams of light into
cone-shaped flying saucers, you've got to admit that requires quite an as-
tonishing leap!"

"I know! I know!" Linda says. "I've been there. I've been exactly where
you are. Denial. We're all in denial."

"So how did you get 'here' from 'there'?"

"It's the steady drip," she says, "the steady drip of letters and phone calls.
And then you get invited to a conference as I was, to present my Strange
Harvest documentary, and you get more feedback. And when you hear the
abductees, how they struggle with this on a second-by-second, minute-by-
minute, hour-by-hour basis because they're living and dealing with this in-
timately . . .

"I mean, I know! I know exactly what this conference must be like for
you!" she continues. "It absolutely must be comparable to the way it was
during any great revolutionary paradigm shift — whether it was Galilean, or
Copernican, or Darwinian. We're in the middle of it! We're literally in the
chaos of redefinition of what we are as a species in relation to the universe.
If you go outside this conference, if you move into the new literature in
quantum physics — Michael Talbot's The Holographic Universe, or John
Gribbin's In Search ofSchrodinger's CatznA Time Warps — you're hearing the
same kind of stuff. The Holographic Universe, I was amazed to see, even has
a chapter relating to the UFO phenomenon. But what Talbot and Gribbin
and all these others are trying also to wrestle with is where theoretical math
is taking us: that there has to be other dimensions and what we perceive as
a solid reality is basically a quantum wave function — meaning, in theoreti-

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105

cal physics and in a holographic universe, your briefcase next to you and my
hand are like interference patters. They are mass/energy exchanges."
"What does this mean?" I ask.

"It means, theoretically, we may be getting close to this new definition
of the universe. But until this story is accessible and has some impact on
everybody's daily life, what else can you expect but indifference, if not
ridicule? I, personally, have gone through enormous walls of disbelief and
fear, and a lot of other things," Linda tells me. "But, what I've begun to re-
alize in my own step-by-step process is this: depending on the evolution of
the information, my perspective keeps changing. I think what's going on
could be one thing one year and another thing the next. And because of
that, I've become very cautious about saying that I think what's happening
is negative, or I think it's positive, or I think it's anything in between — blue,
yellow, purple. All I can say is, we're dealing with another intelligence."

"As in extraterrestrial'? From another planet?" I ask.

"I don't know where it is from!" she says. "I don't know exactly what the
intent might be. But in the overall picture of the human impact you do begin
to get a perspective — and so do the abductees I know. However, when you
hit this new, like you have, you can't achieve any perspective. It's day-to-day.
That's where your reactions are. But I've lived in this long enough now to see
that an abductee who was absolutely traumatized in 1980, who used the
words 'I was raped' — the abductee was male, by the way," she says, adding,
"this is based on absolute fact — this same abductee twelve years later has em-
braced the notion that he is dealing with an advanced intelligence who is try-
ing to guide this human species up out of a blind, myopic muck.

"In April 1983," Linda continues, "I was working on the development
stage of a documentary for HBO. They had screened A Strange Harvest znd
asked if I would do an hour that went beyond the animal mutilation story;
so I was working on a project with the title UFOs: The E. T. Factor. I spoke
with Peter Gerston, the attorney who had done all the Freedom of Infor-
mation Act filings against the National Security Agency, the Central Intel-
ligence Agency, the Department of Defense Intelligence Agency, and a
whole squad of other government acronyms, concerning suppressed, hid-
den, classified information that the intelligence community and our gov-
ernment had on UFOs. Anyway, in April 1983 I was sitting in this AFOSI
[Air Force Office of Special Investigations] office at Kirtland Air Force Base
outside Albuquerque with a special agent. ..."

Linda pauses for a moment, then says, "I'm trying to speak as a jour-
nalist to a journalist, and the only way to deal with this complicated story
is to look at its evolution by decades." She starts talking about the single-
and multiple-eyewitness sightings of lights and discs in the sky during the

106

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

late 1940s and how the modern age of the flying saucer had started with
Kenneth Arnold's sighting on June 24, 1947.

A Marine Corps transport aircraft had been missing for several days in
the Cascade Mountains area, where Arnold, an experienced Boise, Idaho,
air rescue pilot, was flying his small private plane en route to Yakima, Wash-
ington. Arnold was keeping his eyes open for wreckage when he was star-
tled by "a tremendously bright flash." Seconds later he spotted its cause:
nine brilliant objects in loose formation racing over Mount Rainier.

Arnold estimated the nine objects' speed to be an amazing 1,700 mph, a
figure he later lowered to the still — for those days — astonishing speed of
1,350 mph. (Arnold's sighting took place nearly four months before Captain
Charles E. "Chuck" Yeager became the first man to "break the sound barrier"
when he flew the Bell X-i rocket-engined aircraft to 700 mph at 43,000 feet.)

Upon landing at Yakima, Arnold told the ground crew what he had
seen. And when he continued on to Pendleton, Washington, his story had
already preceded him, and skeptical newsmen were on hand when he ar-
rived. But Arnold's solid reputation — not only was he a successful busi-
nessman and experienced, licensed air-rescue and mountain pilot, he was
also a deputy U.S. marshal — forced them to pay attention.

"They were like no aircraft I had ever seen before," Arnold said. "I ob-
served the objects plainly as they flipped and flashed along against the snow
and sky." Arnold reported the objects he saw had wings. It was only later, as
a result of Arnold's attempt to describe to reporters how the craft had flown
with an undulating motion, "like a saucer would if you skipped it across
water," that the press phrase "flying saucer" came into existence. 38

Arnold's was by no means the first sighting of unidentified flying ob-
jects, nor was it even the first reported; but the wide publicity he received,
and his credibility and courage in speaking out about what he had wit-
nessed, encouraged others, hitherto fearful of ridicule, to come forward
with accounts of their sightings, too. More important, perhaps, is the fact
that Arnold's story gave birth to the term "flying saucer" as a means of de-
scribing something strange and anomalous that was clearly artificial, ma-
chinelike, and possibly otherworldly in the sky.

Arnold's sighting, of course, led to various explanations: he had seen the
reflection of his instrument panel on his cockpit window; he had become
slightly snowblind from searching for the downed aircraft; he had stared at
the sun too long; he had seen mirages over the mountains. But there were
some 850 reported UFO sightings in 1947, the peak occurring one month
after Arnold's encounter. The press had attempted to report such stories ob-
jectively, but as the accounts grew more and more fantastic, as hoaxes were
uncovered, and since no one had, so far as the media knew, come up with

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107

clear and convincing evidence that flying saucers existed, the journalists'
natural skepticism emerged and translated itself into ridicule. Inevitably,
one of their targets became Kenneth Arnold himself.

Arnold reacted bitterly: "Call me Einstein or Flash Gordon or just a
screwball," he said. "I'm absolutely certain of what I saw! But, believe me, if
I ever see again a phenomenon of that sort in the sky, even if it's a one-story
building, I won't say a word about it!" 39

On January 7,1948,3 second headline episode occurred. A flight of four
Kentucky Air National Guard propeller-driven F-51 Mustang fighter aircraft
were returning to Godman Air Force Base near Fort Knox when witnesses
in Louisville reported a cone-shaped silvery object some three hundred feet
in diameter moving in a southerly direction overhead. Fort Knox personnel
observed the object as well; and after determining that it was not an aircraft
or weather balloon, Godman flight controllers radioed the incoming F-51S
to check it out. One of them, short on fuel, had to land; but the other three,
led by Captain Thomas Mantell, climbed to intercept.

Mantell. in an attempt to reach the object, pulled ahead of his wingman
and climbed until he sighted it. "Object traveling at half my speed and di-
rectly ahead of me and above," he radioed Godman. "I'm going in to take a
closer look." Moments later, Mantell reported, "It's above me ... it appears
metallic and tremendous in size."

Despite the fact that his F-51 was not equipped with oxygen for high-
altitude flight, Mantell decided to risk climbing to twenty thousand feet in
the hopes of overtaking the strange craft. He lost consciousness in the thin
air; his fighter plane stalled, spun, and fell out of the sky. Mantell was killed
in the crash.

The story of the first military officer to be officially listed as having been
lost in pursuit of a flying saucer received wide coverage. Rumors circulated
that Mantell's body had been found bullet-ridden, or disfigured by unearthly
radiation burns, or that he had been struck down by an alien spacecraft. The
Air Force explanation at the time was that Mantell had been chasing the
planet Venus. Three years later the Navy announced that a secret, high-
altitude Skyhook reconnaissance balloon had been in the area and that Man-
tell had probably died trying to reach it. It is a plausible explanation.

In July 1952, a series of sensational sightings occurred in the Washing-
ton area. On July 10 a mysterious light "too bright to be a lighted balloon
and too slow to be a big meteor" was reported by a National Airlines crew
over Quantico, Virginia, just south of the capital. On July 13 another
strange object climbed directly beneath a second airliner about sixty miles
south of Washington, hovered off to its left for a few minutes, and then,
when the airliner's pilot turned on his landing lights, accelerated up and

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CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

away at tremendous speed. O n July 14, eight UFOs were reported near
Newport News, Virginia, by the crew of a PanAm flight; witnesses on the
ground saw a UFO in the same area the following day.

Four days later, at 11:40 p.m. on July 19, radarscopes at Washington Na-
tional Airport picked up seven UFOs southeast of Andrews Air Force Base.
According to Edward J. Ruppelt, the former head of the Air Force Project
Blue Book (the special organization established to investigate UFO reports,
to which astronomer J. Allen Hynek was then serving as a consultant), the
radars involved were a long-range (one-hundred-mile) radar in the Air Route
Traffic Control (ARTC) section used to control all aircraft approaching
Washington, and a shorter-range radar at the control tower at National Air-
port used to control aircraft in the immediate vicinity of the airport.

Boiling Air Force Base is just east of National Airport across the Po-
tomac River; and ten miles further east, in almost a direct line with National
and Boiling, lies Andrews, which also has a short-range radar. All of these
airfields were linked together by an intercom system. According to Rup-
pelt's account:

When a new shift took over at the ARTC radar room at National Airport,
the air traffic was light so only one man was watching the radarscope. The
senior traffic controller and the six other traffic controllers on shift were
out of the room at 11:40 p.m. when the man watching the radar scope no-
ticed a group of seven targets appear. From their position on the scope he
knew that they were east and just a little south of Andrews AFB. In a way
the targets looked like a formation of slow airplanes, but no formations
were due in the area. As he watched, the targets loafed along at 100 to 130
miles an hour; then in an apparent sudden burst of speed, two of them
streaked out of radar range. These were no airplanes, the man thought, so
he let out a yell for the senior controller. The senior controller took one
look at the scope and called in two more of the men. They all agreed these
were no airplanes. The targets could be caused by a malfunction in the
radar, they thought, so a technician was called in — the set was in perfect
working order.

The senior controller then called the control tower at National Air-
port; they reported they also had unidentified targets on their scopes. So
did Andrews. And both of the other radars reported the same slow speeds
followed by a sudden burst of speed. One target was clocked at 7,000
milesanhour.Bynowthe targets had moved into every sector of the scope
and had flown through the prohibited flying areas over the White House
and the Capitol.

Several times during the night the targets passed close to commercial
airliners in the area and on two occasions the pilots of the airlines saw
lights they couldn't identify, and the lights were in the same spots where

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109

the radars showed the UFOs to be. Other pilots to whom the ARTC radar
man talked on the radio didn't see anything odd, at least that's what they
said, but the senior controller knew airline pilots and knew that they were
very reluctant to report UFOs.

The first sighting of a UFO by an airline pilot took place shortly after
midnight, when an ARTC controller called the pilot of a Capital Airlines
flight just taking off from National. The controller asked the pilot to keep
watch for unusual lights — or anything. Soon after the pilot cleared the
traffic pattern, and while ARTC was still in contact with him, he suddenly
yelled, "There's one — off to the right — and there it goes." The controller
had been watching the scope, and a target that had been off to the right
of the Capitaliner was gone.

During the next fourteen minutes this pilot reported six more iden-
tical lights.

About two hours later another pilot, approaching National Airport
from the south, excitedly called the control tower to report that a light was
following him at "eight o'clock level." The tower checked their radarscope
and there was a target behind and to the left of the airliner. The ARTC
radar also had the airliner and the UFO target. The UFO tagged along be-
hind and to the left of the airliner until it was within four miles of touch-
down on the runway. When the pilot reported the light was leaving, the
two radarscopes showed that the target was pulling away from the airliner.

The clincher came in the wee hours of the morning, when an ARTC
traffic controller called the control tower at Andrews AFB and told the
tower operators that ARTC had a target just south of their tower, directly
over the Andrews Radio range station. The tower operators looked and
there was a "huge, fiery-orange sphere" hovering in the sky directly over
their range station. 40

At 10:30 p.m. on July 26, the following weekend, Washington National
Urport's ARTC again detected slow-moving unidentified targets on its
wenty-four-inch long-range radarscope. The objects, moving in an arc
rom Herndon, Virginia, to Andrews Air Force Base, were carefully tracked;
ach target was represented by a plastic marker placed next to the blip.
X/hen each target had been noted, an ARTC controller called the short-
ange-radar operators at National's tower and at Andrews. They, too, had
>een tracking the same targets.

At 11:30 p.m. two F-94 jet fighters were scrambled from New Castle
bounty Air Force Base in Delaware. All civilian air traffic was ordered to
:lear the area as the jets moved in. As soon as the fighters had been vectored
o where the objects were being tracked, the targets disappeared from the
adarscopes. Visibility was excellent; the jets systematically searched the
ireas of the last radar plots, but neither visual nor radar sightings occurred,

1 10

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

and the jets returned to base. Although the objects were no longer visible to
the pilots or radar operators, witnesses in the Newport News, Virginia, area
began calling nearby Langley Air Force Base to report a mysterious light
that was "rotating and giving off strange colors." A few minutes later, Lang-
ley tower operators themselves sighted either the same or a similar light and
called Air Defense Command for an interceptor.

Another F-94 was scrambled and visually guided toward the strange
light by Langley tower radar operators. The fighter pilot observed the light
himself and headed toward it. But then, the pilot reported, as he ap-
proached the light it suddenly disappeared, "like somebody turning off a
light bulb." He had, however, been able to gain a radar lock on the invisi-
ble object for a couple of minutes before contact was lost.

Air Defense controllers subsequently guided the interceptors toward
one group of lights after another. The pilots were able to get close enough
to visually confirm the presence of lighted objects; but each time a jet tried
to approach, the UFO, as if playing tag, sped away. One UFO, however, re-
mained in place. The pilot confirmed the presence of a light exactly where
the ARTC radar reported it to be; he cut in his F-94's afterburner, chased
after it, and was more successful than he might have wished, since at one
point he reported to the ground controllers that lights were surrounding his
plane and nervously asked what he should do. Before the controllers had a
chance to respond, those lights, too, disappeared.

The obvious question is, Could those radar targets have been created by
the weather? A mild temperature inversion can cause a false target reading.
But the radar operators at Washington National, Andrews, and Langley
were experienced. False returns caused by inversions are not uncommon,
and over the years those operators had seen every type of radar return, real
or false, that exists. Every operator in the radar rooms was firmly convinced
the targets on their screens were caused by radar waves bouncing back from
solid, metallic objects. There were weather-induced targets on their screens,
too, they said; but they were easily identified as such. In addition, there had
been the visual confirmations.

The visual sightings of the unidentified flying objects over Washington
by witnesses both in the air and on the ground, combined with the radar
trackings, created headlines throughout the country and even temporarily
drove coverage of the Democratic National Convention off the front pages
of many newspapers. The Washington sightings were the most sensational
UFO event since the Mantell tragedy four years earlier. 41

UFO reports and inquiries pouring into the Pentagon and the Blue
Book Project so tied up the Pentagon's phones that the nation's military
nerve center was dangerously compromised. In order to allay fears and com-

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1 1 1

bat rumors about UFOs, the Pentagon rushed to hold a press conference.
And on July 29, three days after the second series of Washington sightings,
Major General John A. Samford, the Air Force's chief of intelligence, in an
hour-and-twenty-minute briefing before a large gathering of reporters,
summarized the Air Force's view by stating that the so-called flying saucers
did not constitute a menace to the United States; that none of the several
thousand saucer reports checked by the Air Force in the last six years had
indicated the existence of any solid flying object except in those cases where
the witness had observed a United States aircraft or missile and mistaken it
for a UFO; that the United States had nothing in its weaponry, either ex-
isting or in development, capable of unlimited speed and without mass —
characteristics attributed to many UFOs; and that the vast majority of
reports could be attributed to natural phenomena or tricks to the eye.

A large portion of the briefing time was spent explaining how temper-
ature inversion under certain conditions could create reflections of light
causing false target images on both radar screens and the human eye. Not
invited to attend the briefing were Major Dewey Fournet, the Pentagon's
chief source of information during the Blue Book Project, and the Navy
radar expert who had been present in the radar room with Fournet during
the sightings three days before. Both men firmly rejected the temperature-
inversion hypothesis.

During Linda Moulton Howe's review of the UFO phenomenon she
mentions some of the other classic sightings from the 1940s and 1950s.
One was the Chiles- Whitted sighting on July 24, 1948. Two experienced
Eastern Airlines crew members, pilot Clarence S. Chiles and his co-pilot,
John B. Whitted, en route from Houston to Atlanta, encountered a one-
hundred-foot-long, wingless, finless, cigar-shaped object with two rows of
large, square windows that emanated a bright, glowing light from within.
On a seeming collision course with the UFO, Chiles threw his DC-3 air-
liner into a tight left-hand banking turn, and the object, with a forty-foot
orange-red flame flashing from its tail, shot past not more than seven hun-
dred feet away.

Another sighting was the famous "Lubbock Lights." These sightings
commenced the night of August 25, 1951, and were witnessed by an Atomic
Energy Commission executive and his wife from their Lubbock, Texas,
backyard and simultaneously observed by four respected Texas scientists
from their vantage point in another part of town. The object (or objects)
was perceived as approximately three dozen bluish lights. It had the ap-
pearance of a giant flying wing as it twice moved across the night skies. Sev-
eral hundred people in the area witnessed the same phenomenon over the
next several days. On August 31, Carl Hart Jr. photographed the lights, but

1 1 2

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

photo analysis could prove neither that Hart's still pictures were real or that
they were a hoax.

There existed also two motion-picture films of alleged UFOs. At ii:io
a.m. on July 2, 1950, Warrant Officer Delbert C. Newhouse, a veteran Navy
photographer, shot about thirty feet of film of ten or twelve strange, silvery
objects in the sky near Tremonton, Utah. As the objects flew in a westerly
direction, one of them veered off from the main group and reversed its
course. After a thousand hours of investigation of the Newhouse film, the
Navy Photographic Interpretation Laboratory concluded that the objects
filmed were neither aircraft, birds, balloons, nor reflections and were in fact
"self-luminous." The Robertson Panel — five distinguished nonmilitary sci-
entists convened by the CIA in 1952 to analyze Project Blue Book data —
concluded otherwise: they decided the objects were a formation of birds
reflecting the strong desert sunlight.

At 11:25 a - m - on August 15, i960, in Great Falls, Montana, Nicholas
Mariana shot nearly twenty seconds of film of two disc-shaped objects as
they moved across the sky. On some of the 250 frames the objects are seen
passing behind the girders of a water tower, which gave film analysts an op-
portunity to measure the objects' approximate altitude, speed, azimuth,
distance, and size. It was also a sequence difficult to have faked. Mariana
admitted that he had seen two jet fighters on their final approach to a
nearby Air Force base just prior to his sighting of the objects, but insisted
he knew the difference between the jets and the objects. The Robertson
Panel decided Mariana did not know the difference — that he had filmed
the jets.

"All of a sudden in the 1960s came the 'contactee syndrome,' " Linda
Moulton Howe is telling me. "People were reporting contact with these
blond beings warning of nuclear war or various environmental catastrophes."

"Would that have been 'Professor' George Adamski, 'Dr.' Daniel Fry,
Truman Bethurum, and people like that?" I ask.

"Well, they were in the 1950s," she says, "and they were dismissed pretty
much whole cloth by the society at large."

"Do you dismiss them?"

"The people I know who knew these people don't, but that's a whole
other story. A sidebar," Linda says. "Go to the early sixties: in 1961, the
Betty and Barney Hill abduction. Suddenly abductions are starting, but
they don't get reported until five years later. This same decade, you have an-
imal mutilations making worldwide press, starting for the first time in the
United States and Canada in 1967, and the Zamora and Dexter-Hillsdale
sightings. ..."

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1 13

The Zamora sighting is one of the most puzzling. On April 24, 1964, at
5:45 p.m., near Socorro, New Mexico, Deputy Marshal Lonnie Zamora was
pursuing a speeding motorist through hilly desert terrain when he heard a
loud noise and saw bluish-orange flames off to his right, near where he knew
a dynamite shack to be. Zamora abandoned the chase and drove over to in-
vestigate.

The mysterious flame was still visible when he turned offU.S. Highway
85 onto a gravel access road. The flame was funnel-shaped and appeared to
be lowering itself to the ground. Zamora drove up a steep hill and upon
reaching the top saw the object for the first time. It rested on the ground
some 150 yards away. Zamora thought it was an overturned white car. He
also saw two figures in what he assumed were overalls "very close to the ob-
ject. One of these persons," he reported, "seemed to turn and look straight
at my car and seemed startled — seemed to quickly jump. ..."

Zamora radioed his headquarters that he was proceeding to the car
wreck and drove forward until he was about a hundred feet from the object.
Closer now, Zamora could see that it was twelve to fifteen feet long, con-
structed of something "like aluminum — whitish against the mesa back-
ground," and appeared "oval in shape," without doors or windows. Zamora
radioed that he was leaving his car to investigate. He had scarcely stepped
out when he heard three "loud thumps, like someone shutting a door," fol-
lowed by "a very loud roar," and again observed bluish flame under the ob-
ject. Thinking the object, whatever it was, was about to explode, Zamora
ran panicked back to his car — ran, in fact, into it, with enough force to
knock off his glasses. As the roaring noise increased, Zamora scooped up his
glasses, put them back on, and, shielding his face with his arms, chanced
glancing back long enough to see that the object was rising slowly into the
air. As the object came level with him, Zamora was able to observe a red "in-
signia" on its side: a vertical arrow sandwiched between a horizontal line and
an arc. He scrambled past his car to the reverse slope of the small hill upon
which he had parked and dove behind it. The roaring sound gave way to a
high-pitched whine, and when Zamora risked looking again, the object was
about twenty feet in the air and moving rapidly away from him into the
wind. It soon disappeared from view.

Zamora quickly returned to his car and radioed his report; then he
went down to the slight depression in which the object had rested. There
he found several spots where greasewood bushes were still burning and
"landing pod" indentations in the ground. Several minutes later, when a
sheriff arrived on the scene, he found Zamora pale and visibly shaken. The
sheriff, too, saw the smoldering brush and indentations, and subsequently

1 1 4

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

a gas station attendant reported that a customer had spoken of seeing a
mysterious oval-shaped object flying toward the area just before Zamora
had sighted it.

Major Hector Quintanilla, Ruppelt's replacement as Project Blue Book
chief, was in charge of the Zamora sighting investigation. He later called it
"probably the best-documented case in the Air Force files." J. Allen Hynek
was so impressed with the case he returned several times to the site in his of-
ficial capacity as Blue Book's chief scientific consultant to sift the ground for
clues, collect samples of the soil, and investigate Zamora's character. "It is
my opinion that a real, physical event occurred on the outskirts of Socorro
that afternoon," Hynek concluded. 42

The Dexter-Hillsdale sightings, too, created a furor. On March 20,
1966, near Dexter, Michigan, farmer Frank Mannor and his son watched a
car-sized, football-shaped object with a central porthole and pulsating lights
at each end of its brown quilted surface rise from a swampy area on his farm,
hover several minutes at a thousand feet, then depart. The following day,
eighty-seven women students at Hillsdale College in Hillsdale, Michigan,
their dean, and a civil defense director all claimed to have watched for four
hours a glowing football-shaped object hovering above a swampy area sev-
eral hundred yards from the women's dormitory. At one point the object
flew directly toward the dormitory, then retreated. On another occasion the
object appeared to "dodge an airport beacon light." Its glow would dimin-
ish when police cars approached, and it "brightened when the cars left."

The Michigan sightings made nearly every newspaper. Even The New
York Times — which normally declined to run a "flying saucer" story — gave it
several inches. Major Quintanilla sent Dr. Hynek to Michigan to investigate.

"By the time I arrived," Hynek later wrote, "the situation was so
charged with emotion that it was impossible to do any really serious inves-
tigating. I had to fight my way through reporters to interview witnesses. Po-
lice were madly chasing stars they thought to. be flying saucers. People
believed space ships were all over the area."

Hynek spent a week interviewing witnesses; he even pulled on a pair of
hip boots to wade through farmer Frank Mannor's swamp. Pressure
mounted for an explanation, and on March 27, Hynek held the largest press
conference in the Detroit Press Club's history. Hynek later described the
gathering of television reporters, newspapermen, photographers, and oth-
ers, all "clamoring for a single, spectacular explanation of the sightings," as
a circus.

Hynek said he provided "what I thought at the time to be the only ex-
planation possible. ... I made the statement it was 'swamp gas,' " the phe-

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1 15

nomenon caused by decaying vegetation that has spontaneously ignited,
creating a faint glow. "And even though I went on to emphasize I couldn't
prove it in a court of law, that that was the full explanation. . . . Well,"
Hynek later said, "the press picked up the words 'swamp gas' even before I
had finished the conference and that was all you heard or read about in the
media for weeks." 43

Hynek's "swamp gas" explanation was met with ridicule, hostility, and
increased suspicion that the government was engaged in a cover-up.

A Gallup poll taken just prior to the Dexter-Hillsdale events showed
that 96 percent of the people surveyed were aware of flying saucers; that 46
percent thought them real, 29 percent imaginary; and that 5 percent
thought they had seen one themselves — a figure that, applied to the popu-
lation in general, would mean that by 1966 approximately nine million
Americans already believed they had actually sighted a UFO.

In the 1970s two close encounters in particular made news: the
Pascagoula case in 1973 and the Travis Walton "abduction" in 1975.

The Pascagoula incident involved two men, nineteen-year-old Calvin
Parker and forty-two-year-old Charles Hickson, both of Gautier, Missis-
sippi, who were fishing in the Pascagoula River when they heard a buzzing
noise behind them. Both turned and were terrified to see a ten-foot-wide,
eight-foot-high, glowing egg-shaped object with blue lights at its front hov-
ering just above the ground about forty feet from the riverbank. As the men,
frozen with fright, watched, a door appeared in the object, and three strange
Beings floated just above the river towards them.

The Beings had legs but did not use them. They were about five feet tall,
had bullet-shaped heads without necks, slits for mouths; and where their
noses or ears would be, they had thin, conical objects sticking out, like car-
rots from a snowman's head. They had no eyes, gray, wrinkled skin, round
feet, and clawlike hands. Two of the Beings seized Hickson; when the third
grabbed Parker, the teenager fainted with fright. Hickson claimed that
when the Beings placed their hands under his arms, his body became numb,
and that then they floated him into a brightly lit room in the UFO's inte-
rior, where he was subjected to a medical examination with an eyelike de-
vice which, like Hickson himself, was floating in midair. At the end of the
examination, the Beings simply left Hickson floating, paralyzed but for his
eyes, and went to examine Parker, who, Hickson believed, was in another
room. Twenty minutes after Hickson had first observed the UFO, he was
floated back outside and released. He found Parker weeping and praying on
the ground near him. Moments later, the object rose straight up and shot
out of sight.

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CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

Expecting only ridicule if they were to tell anyone what had happened,
Hickson and Parker initially decided to keep quiet; but then, because they
felt the' government might want, or ought, to know about it, they tele-
phoned Kessler Air Force Base in Biloxi. A sergeant there told them to con-
tact the sheriff. But uncertain about the reception their bizarre story might
get from the local law, they drove to the local newspaper office to speak with
a reporter. When they found the office closed, Hickson and Parker felt they
had no alternative but to talk to the sheriff.

The sheriff, after listening to their story, put Hickson and Parker in a
room wired for sound in the belief that if the two men were left alone,
they would reveal their hoax; of course, they did not. The local press re-
ported their tale; the wire services picked it up; and within several days the
Pascagoula close encounter was major news all over the country. The Aer-
ial Phenomena Research Organization (APRO), founded in 1952, sent
University of California engineering professor James Harder to Missis-
sippi to investigate; J. Allen Hynek, representing the Air Force, also ar-
rived. Together they interviewed the witnesses. Harder hypnotized
Hickson but had to terminate the session when Hickson became too
frightened to continue.

Hickson and Parker both subsequently passed lie detector tests. Hynek
and Harder believed the two men's story. And Hynek was later quoted as
saying, "There was definitely something here that was not terrestrial." 44

The Travis Walton case is even more bizarre: On November 5, 1975,
twenty-two-year-old Travis Walton had, with his six companions, finished
thinning trees on Mogollon Rim, ten miles south of Heber, Arizona. They
were driving home in their truck when they saw a glowing object hovering
approximately fifteen feet above the ground off to the side of the road. They
stopped the truck and Walton jumped out to get a closer look. As he ap-
proached, a beam of light flashed from the UFO and struck Walton so hard
in the chest he was flung backwards ten feet and lay on the ground uncon-
scious. His panicked companions sped off in the truck. As they fled they saw
the UFO lift off and fly away. Subsequently they calmed down enough to
return and look for Walton; but he was nowhere to be found.

According to Walton when he regained consciousness, he was inside the
UFO lying on a metal table being observed by three small aliens with large
hairless heads, chalk-white skin, huge oval eyes, and tiny slit mouths. A dif-
ferent alien, one who, Walton said, looked like a normal human being, later
led him out of the UFO into a hangarlike structure containing a number of
other alien craft. Several other human-looking aliens met him there and
brought him to a second table upon which they stretched him out. A mask
was lowered over his face and Walton blacked out. When he came to he was

At the Conference 1 1 7

lying by the side of a road near Heber watching a UFO climb straight up
into the sky above.

Walton, who thought he had been gone only a few hours, discovered he
had been missing for five days.

"By the time of the Travis Walton case," Linda was telling me, "animal mu-
tilations were being reported worldwide. They were occurring three cases
per county per day in some Colorado sheriffs' offices and other places! An-
imals still warm to the touch with this same cookie-cutter stuff. And then
something else happened: Jimmy Carter became President in 1976. He had
been elected talking about his own experience of a UFO sighting shared
with his son and had said when he became President, he would open up the
government files on UFOs. But then, when he did become President, an ex-
traordinary thing happened. He had been in office only a few months — I
don't remember precisely how long now — and everything concerning
UFOs was officially transferred to the National Security Agency.*

"Then in '79 there was another flurry of animal mutilations, which was
when I first became involved in the story," Linda continues. "I made A
Strange Harvest and was trying to grapple with that part. And that docu-
mentary led, in 1983, to UFOs: The E. T. Factor, the HBO project which I
started telling you about before I began all this backtracking. And that led

* A report of Carter's account of his UFO sighting and subsequent efforts to make the
government's UFO information public appears in British author Timothy Good's inves-
tigative book Above Top Secret: The Worldwide UFO Cover-Up:

During his election campaign in 1976, Jimmy Carter revealed that he had seen a
UFO at Leary, Georgia, in 1969, together with witnesses prior to giving a speech
at the local Lions Club. "It was the darndest thing I've ever seen," he told re-
porters. "It was big, it was very bright, it changed colors, and it was about the size
of the moon. We watched it for ten minutes, but none of us could figure out what
it was. One thing's for sure: I'll never make fun of people who say they've seen
unidentified objects in the sky."

Carter's sighting has been ridiculed by skeptics such as Philip Klass and
Robert Sheaffer. While there appear to be legitimate grounds for disputing the
date of the incident, Sheaffer's verdict that the UFO was nothing more exotic than
the planet Venus is not tenable. As a graduate in nuclear physics who served as a
line officer on U.S. Navy nuclear submarines, Carter would not have been fooled
by anything so prosaic as Venus, and in any case he described the UFO as being
about the same size as the moon.

"If I become President," Carter vowed, "I'll make every piece of information
this country has about UFO sightings available to the public and the scientists."
Although President Carter did all he could to fulfill his election pledge, he was

1 1 8

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

to my being in the Air Force Office of Special Investigations out at Kirtland
Air Force Base.

"My original reason for going to Kirtland was to get witnesses and in-
formation about an alleged landing of an alien craft at Ellsworth Air Force
Base in South Dakota in 1977," Linda tells me. "It's a long story. . . ."

It is alleged that around 9:30 p.m. on November 16, 1977, a "saucer-
shaped object" landed approximately fifty yards beyond the fence sur-
rounding an Ellsworth missile silo. Air Force security was alerted when an
"inner zone alert" was triggered beneath the 150-ton hardened concrete
block atop the silo. The alarm indicated someone or something had entered
the underground chamber. Two airmen were sent to investigate.

According to the supposedly "official" report Linda later makes avail-
able to me:

. . . Upon arrival (i^hrs) at Site #L-9, LSAT, JENKINS & RAEKE, dis-
mounted the SAT vehicle to make a check at the site fence line. At this
time RAEKE observed a bright light shining vertically upwards from the
rear of the fence line at L-9. (There is a small hill approximately 50 yards
behind L-9). JENKINS stayed with the SAT vehicle and RAEKE pro-
ceeded to the source of the light to investigate. As RAEKE approached
the crest of the hill, he observed an individual dressed in a glowing green
metallic uniform and wearing a helmet with visor. RAEKE immediately
challenged the individual; however, the individual refused to stop and
kept walking toward the rear fence line at L-9. RAEKE aimed his M-16
rifle at the intruder and ordered him to stop. The intruder turned toward
RAEKE and aimed an object at RAEKE which emitted a bright flash of
intense light. The flash of light struck RAEKE's M-16 rifle, disintegrat-
ing the weapon, and causing second and third degree burns to RAEKE'S

thwarted, and it was clear that NASA had a hand in blocking his attempts to re-
open investigations. When Carter's science adviser, Dr. Frank Press, wrote to
NASA Administrator Dr. Robert Frosch in February 1977 suggesting that NASA
should become the "focal point for the UFO question," Dr. Frosch replied that
although he was prepared to continue responding to public inquiries, he proposed
that "NASA take no step to establish a research activity in this area or to convene
a symposium on this subject."

In a letter from Colonel Charles Senn, Chief of the Air Force Community
Relations Division, to Lieutenant General Duward Crow of NASA, dated 1 Sep-
tember 1977, Colonel Senn made the following astonishing statement, "I sincerely
hopethatyou are successful in preventinga reopening of UFO investigations' [Good's
italics] . So it is clear that NASA (as well as the Air Force and almost certainly the
CIA and National Security Agency) was anxious to ensure that the President's
election pledge remained unfulfilled.' 15

At the Conference 1 1 9

hands. RAEKE immediately took cover and concealment and radioed
the situation to JENKINS, who in turn radioed a 10-13 distress call to
Lima control. JENKINS responded to RAEKE'S position and carried
RAEKE back to the SAT vehicle. JENKINS then returned to the rear
fence line to stand guard. JENKINS observed two intruders dressed in
the same uniforms walk through the rear fence line of L-9. JENKINS
challenged the two individuals but they refused to stop. JENKINS aimed
and fired two rounds from his M-16 rifle. One bullet struck one intruder
in the back and one bullet struck one intruder in the helmet. Both in-
truders fell to the ground, however, approximately 15 seconds later both
returned to an upright position and fired several flashes of light at JENK-
INS. JENKINS took cover and the light missed JENKINS. The two in-
truders returned to the east side of the hill and disappeared. JENKINS
followed the two and observed them go inside a saucer-shaped object ap-
proximately 20' in diameter and 20' thick. The object emitted a glowing
greenish light. Once the intruders were inside, the object climbed verti-
cally upwards and disappeared over the eastern horizon. EAF #1 arrived
at the site at 2230 hrs and set up a security perimeter. Site Survey Teams
arrived at the site (oi2ohrs) and took radiation readings which measured
from 1.7 to 2.9 roentgens. Missile maintenance examined the missile and
warhead and found the nuclear components missing from the warhead. 46

"I thought the meeting with this AFOSI agent inside' Kirtland would
last about fifteen minutes — 'Here's something to check out and I'll be on
my way,' " Linda was saying. "He began by telling me, 'That Strange Har-
vest documentary you did upset some people in Washington. They don't
want UFOs and animal mutilations connected together in the public's
mind.' Later, he reached into a drawer, took out a plain envelope contain-
ing some letter-sized stationery, and said, 'My superiors have asked me to
show this to you. You can't take notes. You can ask me questions.' He
handed the papers to me and said, 'I want you to move from that chair
you're sitting in,' and motioned me to one in the middle of this big office,
saying, 'Eyes can see through windows.'

"I was completely confused by what was going on," Linda continues.
"When I looked down at the paper, what it said was, 'Briefing Paper for the
President of the United States on the Subject of Identified Aerial Vehicles
(IAVs)' — IAVs," Linda says with a little laugh, "not UFOs! To make a long
story short, it was all about our government's retrieval of crashed discs and
alien bodies, dead and alive. An alien — they discussed it as an 'extraterres-
trial biological entity,' or EBE — had been taken to Los Alamos in 1949 from
a crash in New Mexico. According to the briefing paper, the government
learned a lot about that alien civilization."

"Was this the Roswell, New Mexico crash?" I ask.

120

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

"There were two different crashes at Roswell," Linda says, "one in 1947
and one in 1949.* This was supposedly the 1949 one. Six creatures were
found, five dead and one alive. The bodies were described as gray-colored,
with both reptilian and insect characteristics, about three feet to four and a
half feet tall. Long arms, four long 'fingers,' no opposable thumb, clawlike
nails with webbing between fingers. Instead of a nose and ears, there were
only holes. An Air Force major took responsibility for the live one and had
it transported to the Los Alamos Laboratory north of Albuquerque. Ac-
cording to the paper I read, the creature lived at Los Alamos until June 18,
1952, when it died of unknown causes."

I was speechless.

"The paper began with a summary about crashes of silver discs in the
southwestern United States," Linda continues. "My memory says the first

* Ufologists consider the 1947 Roswell crash the most thoroughly investigated, au-
thenticated, and enduring evidence of the government's conspiracy to prevent the public
from learning the truth about UFOs. Believers in this "cover-up of cover-ups" insist that the
remains of a "flying disc" were recovered on a rancher's land near Roswell; that the govern-
ment was holding the bodies of aliens retrieved from the crash in Hangar 18 at the then-
named Wright Field near Dayton, Ohio; that incredibly strong, lightweight structural
materials recovered from the saucer were being examined; and that the ranchers upon whose
land the saucer debris was found were warned not to speak about what they had seen under
penalty of death. Books written about that crash include Charles Berlitz and William L.
Moore's The Roswell Incident, Kevin Randle and Donald R. Schmitt's The U.F.O. Crash at
Roswell, George Eberhardt's The Roswell Report, and Stanton T. Friedman and Don
Berliner's The Crash at Corona. The incident also spawned numerous articles and a televi-
sion drama.

Early in 1994, in reaction to continuing insistence that a cover-up existed, Representa-
tive Steven H. Schiff of New Mexico asked the General Accounting Office — the investiga-
tive arm of Congress — to urge the Pentagon to declassify documents relating to Roswell. In
response, Secretary of the Air Force Sheila E. Widnall ordered that the Air Force investiga-
tion and report be as thorough as possible. The results of that investigation were reported
in a box on the front page of The New York Times in late September that same year. Ac-
cording to the Times: "The wreckage, quickly whisked away by the Air Force, was part of
an airborne system for atomic-age spying" called Project Mogul. Balloon-launched, its pur-
pose was "to search high in the atmosphere for weak reverberations from nuclear blasts half
a world away. The debris, found near Roswell, N.M., was a smashed part of the program's
balloon's sensors, and of most consequence to the growth of spaceship theories, radar re-
flectors made of thin metal foil.

"At the time, the Air Force said the wreckage was that of a weather balloon, a white
lie," the Times piece continued. "But over the decades, the incident grew to mythic dimen-
sions among flying-saucer cultists, who spun slim evidence into weighty charges. . . . On
Sept. 8, after an eight-month investigation, the Air Force issued a report and a number of
thick appendices that to all appearances deflate the conspiracy theory once and for all. Of
course, ardent flying-saucer fans contend that the cover-up continues." 47

At the Conference

121

date was 1946. Other dates included 1947 and 1949 and some in the early
1950s. In addition to the two Roswell crashes, some others I remember listed
were one in Aztec, New Mexico; one in Kingman, Arizona; and a crash
south of Texas in northern Mexico. According to the paper, our radar inter-
fered with the aliens' guidance system. But this is the bottom line: this is a
planet in which there has been some kind of other intelligence involved for
eons. And then in 1988, '89, '90, and '91 came the crop circles."

"You mean those patterns in the English wheat fields?"

"Not just England," Linda corrects me. "By 1990 some two thousand of
these crop circle formations had been formed, and I don't think people un-
derstand we are talking about worldwide activity in more than a dozen
countries! Last summer soil samples were taken from beneath some of these
circles in England, in Medina, New York, and from Vancouver, British Co-
lumbia. A biophysicist in Michigan examined cell pits in the plants and
found they had separated in such a fashion that the only biological expla-
nation was that heat of some sort had been applied from the outside quite
rapidly. The Oak Ridge, Tennessee nuclear lab did analyses on two soil sam-
ples — a limited amount, we all acknowledge that, but they have confirmed
three isotope changes in the soil of two of those formations, and — "

"What do those changes signify?" I ask.

"It would be like if you tried to jump on a piece of coal to turn it into a
diamond. When you change the subatomic structure of atoms, that's where
you get into isotope changes. So when there were isotope changes in the soil
in England, it's inexplicable in any easy way. It's as one of the nuclear design
engineers said: you would have to have a portable cyclotron or fusion reac-
tor and be able to control and focus it in order to cause that kind of isotope
changes. And the investigators trying to understand this whole, giant UFO
puzzle were looking at the crop circle phenomenon and asking, Are the crop
circles building up to direct communication from the intelligence involved
with this planet?' There' ve already been thirty-seven new crop circles this
summer, probably more of them by now. And the people who are studying
this phenomenon closely are convinced it's some other intelligence.

"So the whole mood of the field, from my perspective, shifted somehow
when this crop circle phenomenon came in," Linda continues. "It's a subtle
and odd thing, but it's as if the whole picture got wider, even though there's
no verifiable direct connection. There's no 'I can show you a photograph of
a silver disc making a crop circle.' Nobody has that. But somehow crop cir-
cles entered this picture as being part of the UFO mystery. What may be
happening before the decade is out is that the crop circles and all are build-
ing up to finally meeting another consciousness from somewhere else in the
universe."

122 CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

"So you're saying they're not just circles?"

"No. Those who have studied the formations say the designs have a mu-
sical quality as well as a mathematical one. The February i Science News
cover story is 'Geometric Harvest.' It reports that of the eighteen crop cir-
cles studied by Gerald Hawkins, the British astronomer formerly with the
Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts,
Hawkins discovered in eleven of them 'ratios of small whole numbers that
precisely match the ratios defining the diatonic scale.' In other words, he
found that these ratios produce the eight notes of an octave in the musical
scale played on the white keys of a piano: do-re-mi-fa-so-la-ti-do."

"That was the first surprise," Hawkins said, according to the piece I
later read in Science News. The existence of those ratios, the article contin-
ued, "prompted Hawkins to begin looking for geometrical relationships
among the circles, rings and lines of particularly distinctive patterns that
had been recorded in the fields. Their creation had to involve more than
blind luck, he insists."

Based on his study of the geometric relationships of the patterns left
in these fields, Hawkins was able to discover four new geometric theo-
rems. He then realized, Science News reported, "that his four original the-
orems, derived from crop circle patterns, were really special cases of a
single, more general theorem. 'I found underlying principles — a common
thread — that applied to everything which led me to the fifth theorem,'
[Hawkins] says."

The piece continued: "Remarkably, [Hawkins] could find none of these
theorems in the works of Euclid, the ancient Greek geometer who estab-
lished the basic rules and techniques of what is known as Euclidean geom-
etry. He was also surprised at his failure to find the crop-circle theorems in
any of the mathematical textbooks and references, ancient and modern, that
he consulted.

" 'They really are not there,' Hawkins says. 'I found nothing close. I
don't know where else to go.' " 48

Although Hawkins does not entirely reject the possibility that the crop
circles are the work of hoaxers such as David Chorley and Douglas Bower,
the two elderly English landscape painters who admitted creating a number
of the wheat-field patterns that puzzled southern England during the last
decade, he argues that the hoaxers would have "had to know a tremendous
lot of old-fashioned geometry."

As the Science News piece pointed out: "The hoaxers apparently had the
requisite knowledge not only to prove a Euclidean theorem, but also to con-
ceive of an original theorem in the first place — a far more challenging task.
To show how difficult such a task can be Hawkins often playfully refuses to

At the Conference

123

divulge his fifth theorem, inviting anyone interested to come up with the
theorem itself before trying to prove it.

" 'It's a good test,' he says. 'It's easy to prove the theorem but so difficult
to conceive it.' " 49

Gerald Hawkins is not new to controversy. In his 1965 book Stonehenge
Decoded, written with John B. White, Hawkins had proposed that the im-
mense and mysterious Neolithic circle of stones in Salisbury was a sophisti-
cated moon and sun observatory capable of predicting solstices and eclipses.
'His theory, Hawkins subsequently wrote, "was reviewed harshly: 'Tenden-
tious, arrogant, slipshod and unconvincing,' 'meretricious persuasion,' 'lit-
erary giftwrapping,' 'moonshine.' " 50 But his Stonehenge hypothesis
appears to be holding up. It will be interesting to see if his crop circle theo-
ries do as well.

"If in the crop circles there are mathematical components and musical
components — both are quite the same, really," Linda is saying — "then some
linguists are suggesting that what we are building up to is that an intelli-
gence from somewhere else is communicating at literally a grass-roots level.
It's bypassing political structure, it's bypassing governmental censorship. It
is going to the broad earth itself to lay down some kind of communication
and language." 51

We talk a little about the various factions represented at the M.I.T. con-
ference and how, as Linda says, there is emerging a "tension between the in-
tuitive investigators and the demanding academicians.

"The academics are demanding hard physical evidence and scientific
methods of experimentation," she says. "And it's way past time. I'm very
grateful that the professionals are getting involved. But there's a whole
group who's been at it for thirty years. And they already have a certain kind
of intuitive understanding of certain elements of this phenomenon that
can't be demonstrated or proven. It's just the sheer critical mass of informa-
tion they have accumulated. And it's this same critical mass that makes this
phenomenon now okay for the scientists and academics to investigate.

"But along with the rigorousness of the scientific method, which is
vital," Linda says, "you start having people putting things into boxes. A lot
of the abductees and the investigators feel that the boxes being drawn are too
narrow. In defense of those who are narrowing the boxes, their argument is
that you have to share with the public the core data, meaning only that
which is the most repetitive, because all the other, more anomalous data is
too far out and people won't accept it. But to those of us who are trying to
grasp the biggest picture possible of what's happening, if you draw the boxes
too narrowly, you could be excluding some of the key insights. And that's
what's been happening. There are all of those asking for a bigger picture,

124 CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

who are insisting that there aren't just 3X-to-4-foot Grays with huge, black,
slanted eyes, but rather that it's an extremely complicated picture."

Linda tells me of a Colorado deputy sheriff who went out on a cattle-
mutilation investigation and came upon a mysterious glowing red rectangle
in a forest of trees. "He was terrified!" she says. "He went back into town to
get another deputy, drives back out, and now both men see a forest of trees
with a glowing red rectangle and they don't know what to make of it."

"The glowing red rectangle was within the trees?" I ask.

"Yes! And they're scared to death! They return to town, and the next
morning this Colorado deputy sheriff, haunted by what he had seen, drives
back out to the site again. There are the tire marks of where they had
stopped and everything, but there's not a single tree."

"What was there?"

"Nothing!" Linda says. "It had all been created. Remember the word
they've used in this conference, 'staging'? It had all been staged. This is a
huge other part of the complexity of this. Over and over again, in case after
case — and it doesn't matter whether you're talking with the captain of a jet
airliner at thirty thousand feet, or a farmer on the ground, or a housewife in
her kitchen, or a reporter driving on a freeway who sees this enormous Close
Encounters of the Ti^zWAyWlighted-chandelier kind of 'mother ship' in the
sky — I mean, these are real things. This reporter in Colorado saw something
so gigantic he thought the world was coming to an end. For those of us who
have been in this long enough, when you've heard enough stories about a
string of boxcars on a railroad track that suddenly go straight up in the air;
or a helicopter that makes no sound but which suddenly turns into a disc;
or a little biplane that moves into the fog and comes out a disc; or oil bar-
rels in Texas that rise, vertically, straight up — "

"These are all phenomena that have been reported?"

"Yes! Absolutely. It's staging! There's something about this phenome-
non at every level that seems to be creating theater — or is disguising itself
in some way. And to jump back for a moment to this alleged briefing
paper I was shown at Kirtland Air Force Base — if the implications of that
paper were pointing in any direction that was true, it implies that this
alien phenomenon isn't just a twentieth-century phenomenon, but that
these ETs have come at various intervals in the earth's history to manipu-
late DNA in already existing terrestrial primates and perhaps in other life
forms as well."

"How far back are you talking about?"

"To the best of my memory, the time intervals for the DNA manipula-
tion specifically listed in the briefing paper were 25,000, 15,000, 5,000, and
2,500 years ago. And what this means is, it's not just a twentieth-century

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125

phenomenon — which none of us knows for sure — but rather it's millennia,
and that maybe we are somebody's experiment."

"Howaboutyou, Linda?" I say. "You haven't been abducted, or had any
experiences of this sort, yourself?"

She shakes her head no.

"So, in other words, you're just like me — only you're twelve years far-
ther down the line."

"That's right!" she says.

The afternoon's sessions concentrate on the general psychological profile of
the abductees. This, I think, should be interesting, because if there is some
sort of psychological explanation for this abduction phenomenon, the ini-
tial indications of it should become apparent here.

Mark Rodeghier, the director of investigations for CUFOS, is up.
Rodeghier, as the conference's first presenter, established the ground rules
for considering whether an abduction had or had not taken place.

Rodeghier reports that psychological and demographic data was col-
lected from thirty-two individuals who met the CUFOS criteria for an ab-
duction experience. Of that sample, women outnumbered the men three to
one. The group was 94 percent Caucasian; the median age was thirty-eight;
the average education was at least two years of college. Forty-two percent of
the abductees were Protestant, 21 percent had no religious affiliation, and 37
percent were presumably scattered among the world's other religions. Fifty-
eight percent of the abductees were married; they averaged 1.9 children and
3.1 siblings. The bulk of them experienced their first abductions between
1970 and 1979.

Given the Index of Childhood Memory and Imagination (ICMI) for
fantasy-prone individuals, the group tested at 24.0 on a 0-52 scale. The pop-
ulation norm is between 20 and 23. They tested 25.2 for hypnotic sug-
gestibility; the population norm is 20.8. Of that test group, Rodeghier says,
five of the individuals had scores above the standard cutoff point. In other
words, the abductees examined were very slightly more fantasy-prone and
more hypnosis-suggestible than the norm.

About 20 percent of the sample experienced vivid images and/or sounds
when falling asleep or waking up.

The results of the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory
(MMPI), designed to measure various neurotic or pathologic character as-
pects of a personality, indicated that the sample's mean scores fell essentially
within the normal range for a group of adults. The MMPI is well-respected
within the field if one is trying to get at individuals' more conscious behav-

126 CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

ior rather than unconscious intentions and impulses. It would reveal, for ex-
ample, if an individual is prone to lying.

Rodeghier reports the study's conclusion: the sample abductees as a
group tended not to be significantly more fantasy-prone nor have a signifi-
cantly higher level of suggestibility than the population norm. Further-
more, the sample as a whole did not contain overt pathologies. A cluster
analysis of the primary MMPI scales, however, revealed two well-defined
groups of abductees; they were labeled Clusters I and II. The Cluster II in-
dividuals had higher scores on most MMPI primary scales and markedly
higher scores on the Keane Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder Subscale. Clus-
ter II individuals also reported more loneliness as adults, less happiness
throughout their lives, more problems sleeping, and a greater incidence of
sexual abuse as children.

I lean over and ask one of the psychologists seated next to me, "Who
are the Cluster lis?"

"The crazies," he says with a thin smile.

Joanne Bruno and Eric Jacobson, two Boston-area psychologists, report
next on their study of individuals who had contacted the Massachusetts
branch of the Mutual UFO Network (Mass-MUFON) because they sus-
pected they had had abduction experiences and wanted hypnosis. The ab-
ductees had been referred to Bruno and Jacobson by Mass-MUFON, who
were interested in determining how common those individuals' narrative
features were, and the incidence of psychiatric disorders.

Bruno and Jacobson were looking for any factors in these individuals'
lives or backgrounds that could be connected to their abduction experi-
ences. It was simply a study of their abduction narratives coupled with a
compilation of their medical and life histories. The two psychologists' pre-
liminary impression, they report, was that there was no evidence of any psy-
chological or organic reasons for these abductees' experiences. However,
they did note that a "significant proportion" of the abductees reported a
"lifetime of odd dissociative episodes" which did not appear to fit any pat-
tern of those dissociative disorders normally encountered. Some provided
"classic abduction narratives"; but there was a second group, which the psy-
chologists referred to as the "florid" types, who, while they may have had an
abduction experience, also reported having supernatural experiences in-
cluding telepathic communication with aliens and ghosts.

The "florid" types, Bruno and Jacobson tell us, are highly hypnotic-
suggestive, prone to trancelike states and dissociative disorders. Some sim-
ply had strange stories: the woman who remembered from her childhood a
large, gray, stone rabbit beside her crib, but recalled nothing else mysteri-
ous. One "florid" told the psychologists a long story complete with numer-

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127

ous details about his life as the "mascot of an alien family who had raised
him as a kid." He was diagnosed a schizophrenic. Another "florid," a
woman, reported that prior to experiencing a week-long abduction, she had
been fasting and had lost both her job and her lover. She believed she was
being recruited by astronauts. Medical tests indicated she had a thyroid dis-
order, and the two psychologists determined she was suffering from a thy-
roid psychosis.

In other words, some people who do "present" with abduction narra-
tives ("present" being, again, the psychiatric term for the general impression
the individual gives) actually do suffer from identifiable psychiatric disor-
ders. These are Rodeghier's Cluster II "crazies."

"It is very important, for a number of reasons, that we acknowledge and
systematically explore this," Jacobson and Bruno tell us. "Among these rea-
sons are: (i) Our critics will immediately point it out; the individuals' dis-
orders will be verifiable; and our failure to acknowledge this will weaken our
case that most abduction narrators do not suffer from any identifiable psy-
chiatric disorder. (2) It is irresponsible for us to imply that people who pre-
sent abduction narratives never need help for major psychiatric disorders.
And (3) any study of human problems benefits tremendously from the de-
velopment of differential diagnoses of cases, and our claim that we can iden-
tify 'real' abductees would be powerfully strengthened if we were able to
demonstrate our ability to systematically differentiate those abduction nar-
rators who are suffering a mental disorder from those who are not."

What they are saying makes sense: even if 80 percent of the individuals
coming forward with abduction narratives are Cluster II "crazies," there are
still 20 percent whose claims should be taken seriously enough to be scien-
tifically pursued.

"This is an issue which is itself diagnostic of us and our claim to be
doing some kind of objective research," the psychologists say. "To shy away
from this issue would be a sign that one is interested in insulating an ideol-
ogy about the abduction experience from contact with challenging facts.
And that, of course, is how to promote a cult, not how to do science."

The question is raised that since there are some people who do have
major psychological problems, "how do we differentiate between genuine
abduction cases and psychiatric cases who use abduction as a shield?" Is the
abductee telling the truth or not? How can one tell if an individual's ab-
duction memory is a "screen memory" for something else. Some memories
may in fact be cover-ups for sexual abuse as a child. And this can initially be
difficult to determine. The three common themes in abductions — being
chosen, bodily invasion, and amnesia — the psychologists point out, are all
comparable to symptoms of childhood sexual abuse.

128 CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

Jacobson and Bruno conclude their presentation by pointing out that
since traumatized people lose their trust in humanity, spiritual missions can
restore meaning to a distressed individual's life. Abductees may become
"cosmic citizens" — a symptom of their postabduction awareness that a sense
of mission is away of restoring meaning. A significant number of abductees,
it is noted, have turned to careers in such fields as education, holistic med-
icine, and religion.

Jo Stone-Carmen, an Arizona psychologist, reports next on her study of
abductees with conscious recall. The subjects were asked to describe them-
selves; what were their five major fears? Their answers included being harmed,
being alone, heights, UFOs, being disabled, control issues, insects, and water.

Where did they feel safe? For the most part, they indicated, the answer
was nowhere. One said, "With God or in the grave." Another said, "On top
of a mountain with all the trees chopped down and I could see for miles in
every direction."

Asked if they had irrational thoughts, one answered, "I don't. But if I
had one, it would be about UFOs and aliens."

Fifty percent of the abductees with conscious recall studied by Stone-
Carmen suffered from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD); their symp-
toms were avoidance, sleep disturbance, fear of being alone, not feeling safe,
low self-esteem; and flashbacks.

Stone-Carmen reports that thirteen out of twenty-three abduction ex-
periencers in one study had attempted suicide — a figure 57 percent higher
than that for the general population. Some correlation obviously exists be-
tween abduction experiences and attempts on one's life, she tells us, but its
meaning is not fully understood, and further study is needed.

No mention is made of how this alarming statistic speaks to the danger
of untrained therapists dealing with abductees. But one psychologist in the
lecture hall stands to plead that we remember "we are dealing with fragile
persons."

Not surprisingly, a substantial number of the abductees in the study
showed low self-esteem, higher vigilance, and guardedness. Such wariness
in dealing with the outside may be a function of social dynamics, Stone-
Carmen explains, in that abductees, like alcoholics, suffer the heavy burden
of keeping their problem secret.

Dr. Donald Johnson, a New Jersey psychologist, reports that his study
group had average IQs, were no more suspicious or naive than the popula-
tion norm, tended to be more open, and that authenticity was important to
them. Johnson's study group were considerably more intuitive and feeling
than the general population, but he concedes, "If aliens are interested in

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1 29

studying human emotions, it would be natural that they would select those
who were more in touch with their feelings."

His closing remarks are important: "None of us studying abductee
groups can be sure we are studying a truly random group," he says. "There-
fore the scientific basis for these studies may be questionable. It is still in a
rudimentary stage. We have to ask ourselves, 'Is what we are seeing a result
of abduction, or is it a precondition?' "

We break for dinner at La Groceria, a small, loud Italian restaurant
within walking distance of the M.I.T. campus. I am at a table with David
Cherniack of the Canadian Broadcasting Company; Karen Wesolowski of
the Atlantic Monthly; and Dr. James Harder, the University of California en-
gineering professor who, as a consultant to the Aerial Phenomena Research
Organization (APRO), was sent to investigate the Pascagoula case in 1973
and the Travis Walton case in 1975.

Dr. Harder is one of the old-timers in the UFO field. At a July 1968
House Science and Astronautics Committee hearing attended also by as-
tronomer Carl Sagan, Project Blue Book advisor J. Allen Hynek, and astro-
nautics engineer Robert M. Baker, Harder did not hesitate to state his belief
that "on the basis of the data and the ordinary rules of evidence as would be
applied in civil or criminal courts, the physical reality of UFOs has been
proved beyond a reasonable doubt." The objects, he testified, were "inter-
planetary," and their propulsion system was based upon "an application of
gravitational fields that we do not understand." 52

It's approximately eight p.m. when we reassemble in the lecture hall and
hear Budd Hopkins suggest that "if the number of abductees we're dealing
with have a lower number of sexual-abuse complaints than the general pub-
lic, then we could say they were screening sexual abuse behind abductions.
But 35 percent responded yes to the question 'Did you ever experience sex-
ual abuse, including fondling, oral sex, or intercourse, as a child?' " — a fig-
ure considerably higher than that given for the general population, which is
approximately 20 to 25 percent.

The next speaker is Richard J. Boylan, Ph.D., a handsome, silver-
haired, Sacramento-based psychologist and licensed clinical social worker.
Boylan disagrees that the nature of the alien encounter and abduction ex-
perience necessarily entails psychological trauma for the subject. Although
Hopkins and Jacobs report that as a result of alien abductions their subjects
experienced, in Boylan's words, "severe fear, panic, chronic anxiety, and
often a syndrome consistent with post-traumatic stress disorder," others,
such as California clinical psychologist Edith Fiore and Boylan himself,
have "noticed a contrasting pattern: subjects whose experiences combined

130 CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

fear — fear of the unknown rather than the menacing — with uplifting feel-
ings and a sense of expanded consciousness or cosmic perspective."
Boylan places a transparency on the overhead projector:

Psychological Characteristics of CE-IVs and Resultant Emotions

a. Encounter with startling stranger(s) = fear

b. Unusual communication mode (telepathy) = uneasiness

c. Sudden entrance of ETs = fear

d. Loss of self-control, movement = fear

e. Penetration of contactee's mind = intrusion

f. Experiences "violating" physical laws = disorientation

g. Other family members involved in CE-IV = anxiety

h. Intrusive involuntary examination or erotic/breeding procedures =
resentment

i. Exposure to worrisome mental scenarios = anxiety
j. Message that ETs will return = uncertainty

k. Memory suppression/fragmentation = disorientation
1. Exposure to advanced technology = curiosity
m. Exposure to advanced Beings = awe
n. Exposure to ET lofty principles = respectfulness

Boylan runs through his list quickly, explaining that both the sequence
and the responses have been discussed to some degree at this conference al-
ready, and moves on to those characteristics necessary to create post-traumatic
stress disorder. "The trauma must entail unusual intentional harm or a disas-
trous incident," Boylan states. "The trauma is repeatedly re-experienced
through anxious recollecting, dreams, flashbacks, or phobic reaction to re-
minders. . . . Psychic numbing occurs. . . . The individual may be anxious
and suffer disrupted consciousness. . . . And finally, the symptoms endure
longer than one month.

"Those elements necessary to create PTSD that are missing for most
CE-Four experiences," Boylan continues, "are the first, that the trauma en-
tailed unusual intentional harm or a disastrous incident; and the third, psy-
chic numbing." (I am struck that the "close encounter of the fourth kind"
phenomenon is so familiar to this conference's attendees that Boylan's "CE-
Four" abbreviation rolls as easily off his tongue and into our understanding
as his "PTSD" abbreviation for post-traumatic stress disorder would at a
convention of psychiatrists.) "The CE-Four paradox," Boylan tells us, "is
that the abductees experience trauma without PTSD."

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13 1

He explains that the hypothesis should be that the abductee syndrome
would be similar to the childhood incest syndrome in that there would be
the presence of trauma, the experience of intrusiveness, psychogenic amne-
sia, a recognized taboo against disclosure, and the onset of PTSD. But, Boy-
Ian points out, this hypothesis doesn't prove true. The CE-IV experience
generally does not elicit PTSD because (i) the aliens "show an absence of
malice"; (2) the abductees generally have "ambivalent feelings about the
ETs: they are bizarre/intelligent, detached/advanced, etc."; (3) the "ETs
communicate reassurances and important agenda"; (4) during the abduc-
tion "no great harm happens"; (5) the contactee, following an abduction ex-
perience, "generally becomes more mentally active"; and (6) he or she
becomes "more attuned to society and/or nature."

For that "minority of contactees" who do experience PTSD, Boylan
suggests alternative explanations. "The ETs' 'medical'/gynecological/uro-
logical procedures create a flashback to an earlier human sexual-molestation
experience." Or, he says, the abductee's "involuntary transfer to the space-
craft: flashes that individual back to a previous human kidnapping or 'con-
finement.' " Or it might be that the "controlling, intrusive ETs trigger a
flashback to abusive or intrusive parental experiences."

What Boylan is saying is that "his" abductees do not suffer from PTSD
because, for the most part, they see their experiences as benign: the Beings
are not malicious, and not only does no harm stem from this contact, but
in fact certain benefits may even accrue. If a few abductees do suffer PTSD,
it is probably because the experience reminds them, on an unconscious
level, of an earlier abusive experience suffered in childhood.

What is now taking place in this M.I.T lecture hall is evident: the slow
grinding away at the premise upon which this conference was seemingly
based — i.e., the Hopkins/ Jacobs/Bullard scenario for menacing abductions.
The shifting tectonic plates are dividing the conference attendees into two
distinct camps: those who believe there are "good" aliens and those who be-
lieve all aliens are manipulative and bad.

At last it is John Mack's turn to speak. In the book of abstracts pre-
pared before the conference, Mack had outlined the basis for his talk as
follows:

When we consider the hundreds of years of training and scientific social-
ization that has brought mental health professional and other clinicians to
our present positivistic world-view it is not surprising that the original re-
action to the stories of abductees is to presume that they and their reports
comprise some individual or collective fantasy or lunacy. Psychosis; dream
or dream state; physical, sexual or satanic ritual abuse; multiple personal-
ity; and some sort of strange dissociative state are among the categories

132

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

that have been offered to account for these unusual cases. Yet my own ex-
perience with evaluating and/or treating more than 40 abductees (the
process is really more like a co-investigation than therapy, although the
abductees generally derive benefit clinically) has confirmed what other in-
vestigators have found: There has yet to be discovered convincing evidence
that anything else has occurred to account for an abductees distress other than
what he or she says has happened [my italics] .

This, of course, then becomes the starting point of a great mystery.
Abductees present as trauma cases. But since trauma is, by definition, the
result of an interaction between the person and events in the world, what
then has happened to them? In this paper I will review the impact of ab-
ductions upon the psyche, personal development and ongoing lives of
abductees. I will discuss the meaning, actual and potential, of this phe-
nomenon for abductees themselves, the mental health and scientific com-
munity and the global culture. 53

But Mack, to my disappointment, tosses away his planned remarks and
opens instead by saying, "You can't get there from here without a shift in our
world-view — a world-view that contains a 'we're here and you're there' sense
of separateness in which the physical world is all that exists. Music, art, etc.,
are in the spirit world, but are they real? In other words," he says, speaking
very quickly, "we can't deal with something such as the abduction phenom-
enon that is so shattering to our literalist, materialist world-view and then
try to understand it from a literalist, materialist world-view!

"The abduction phenomenon attacks our perception of reality," Mack
says excitedly, and speaks of alien beings "who, like Merry Tricksters, float
through walls, turn on and off television sets as a way of showing off their
technological superiority. Is it an intrusion into our space or some sort of
psychic phenomenon?" he asks.

"Our materialist concept requires that we choose: are they in the spirit
world, or are they in the real world?" Mack continues. "When we open our
consciousness, we get information that is replicable. But we also get infor-
mation about Beings, reptiles, etc. that belong in the spirit world. They are
like creatures from 'beyond,' like creatures of imagination. But for some-
thing that should 'exist in the spirit world, they seem to show up in the hard,
real world. That traffic is not supposed to be!

"And so when that traffic occurs," Mack says, "it forces us to learn, to
expand our notions of reality. What it means is that we must rethink our
whole place in the cosmos!"

Mack is interrupted by a standing ovation, which he ignores to add,
"The scientists today are becoming aware of the fact that we have not had
an adequate model to deal with the concept of world forces."

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133

Someone mentions the "super-string theory" — that there might be as
many as six or seven dimensions, not just the three we recognize — and sug-
gests that it is necessary for us to recognize the expansion of our stage. Ann,
the abductee who "dreamed" she had piloted a two-seater UFO and h
swum through an ocean to a neon-green shore, says, "We aren't seeing all
the strings."

Someone else asks, "Could there be multiple space/time dimensions
collapsing into the abductee's consciousness?"

Mary, the Joe Ny man abductee who sat next to me at the conf erence on
the first day, rises to say, "I anticipate with great pleasure working with the
Gray aliens. I'm not left bereft by my experiences. I give them my coopera-
tion and my body, and they give me their koan."

"For the first time in our history," says Marilyn Teare, the silver-haired
California therapist, "we are studying something that is studying us!"

Gilda Moura, the Brazilian psychologist, agrees with John Mack. "The
opening of the consciousness is what we need to do," she says.

Boylan, addressing the audience, asks, "Do you trust the aliens more
than you trust the military?"

There is a chorus of yeses.

But Mack warns, "We are at a point where, as a result of this phenom-
enon, we have more cynicism toward our own establishment than we do to-
ward the phenomenon. We should raise some flags before we say it is
ultimately good without some evidence."

Mack's presentation ends; but while it was going on there was a new ex-
citement in the room, almost a revival-meeting fervor.

David Hufford, a folklorist from Pennsylvania, speaks next, on "Sleep Paral-
ysis and Bedroom Abductions."

Sleep paralysis, he explains, is that temporary paralysis which occurs
immediately before or upon awakening. "However, the psychophysiology
of sleep literature," he says, "grossly underestimates the prevalence of the ex-
perience and is totally lacking in phenomenological description. It is in the
phenomenology of this event, and especially in the presence of a strange
'visitor,' that its anomalous nature lies.

"Also," he continues, "from the phenomenology it is clear that either (a)
sleep paralysis is often involved in the early stages of an abduction, or (b)
the similarity of the sleep paralysis and the 'abduction acquisition' experi-
ence constitutes a very high volume of noise in the abduction data. This
statement is in no way intended to debunk or explain away any part of the
abduction mystery," he insists. "At present 'sleep paralysis' is not an expla-

134 CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

nation, even though some of its neurophysiological mechanisms are known
with reasonable confidence — rather that sleep paralysis itself is an anomaly
on a par with abductions."

Having said that, Hufford describes a case he encountered in which, he
tells us, "an abductee asked for proof that he was not dreaming. When he
awoke a triangle had appeared on his chest. He felt no pain. It was not a burn.
And it has not entirely faded even after eight or nine months." He places a
photograph on the overhead projector. It shows a man with his shirt off. On
his chest is a clearly defined equilateral triangle about four inches to each side.

He describes another subject who heard footsteps in his bedroom, then
suddenly felt a weight on his bed, followed by the pressure of someone
kneeling on his chest. He had a choking sensation, struggled against the
weight, and succeeded in throwing it off. When he turned on his light,
nothing was there.

What Hufford's subject was reporting was the frightening "Old Hag"
phenomenon. While in Newfoundland, Hufford had investigated the "Old
Hag" experience. Witnesses there described it as an actual event: a shadowy
supernatural being attacked them in bed, paralyzing and nearly suffocating
them. Huff ord had assumed the "Old Hag" was merely a folk belief of witch-
craft conforming to local traditions. But when he returned to Pennsylvania
and presented his findings to his students, he was surprised that a number of
them came forward to report strikingly similar experiences they had en-
dured. There was no "Old Hag" folkloric tradition in these students' back-
grounds; they did not even know what to call the phenomenon, and had
been embarrassed to tell anyone of their experiences out of fear of ridicule.

Hufford then learned there was the same legend in Sweden, Denmark,
Poland, Holland, Germany, and Iceland (in Iceland the hag is an ogress),
describing this same distinct and unique set of events. And so it seemed to
be a common cross-cultural experience — but, unlike most folkloric expla-
nations for an anomaly, the "Old Hag" phenomenon was heavily based on
experiences that had shaped the tradition, rather than vice versa.

Seventeen percent of the students Hufford surveyed "had a positive re-
sponse to the 'Old Hag' scenario," he tells us. Of that 17 percent, 80 percent
sensed a presence, saw and heard something, or only heard, or only saw,
something. Hufford identifies the "Old Hag" experience as sleep paralysis
combined with hypnagogic hallucination. ("Hypnagogic" refers to the state
of drowsiness preceding sleep.) The paradox of the "Old Hag" experience —
like the paradox of the abduction experience — is that there is no known
source for the content of the trauma.

Someone from the audience, referring to the photograph of the man
with the triangle on his chest, points out that the triangle is not a unique

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135

symbol, since it is a common alien insignia. Hufford laughs and says,
"That's why I showed it. So you'd all know I was okay."

A therapist rises and says that he has just had a triangle show up on one
of his subjects in the last few days.

An abductee reports that under regression she realized that the mark the
aliens had put on her had been a mistake and that they had told her to put
ice on it and it would go away.

A few months after the conference, I came across Fire in the Brain by
Ronald K. Siegel, an associate research professor in the UCLA School of
Medicine's Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences. Siegel, whose
special area of research is hallucinations, was familiar with David Hufford's
work. (Hufford's 1982 University of Pennsylvania Press publication on the
"Old Hag" phenomenon, The Terror That Comes in the Night, is listed as a
reference for Siegel's "Succubus" chapter in Fire in the Brain) Siegel includes
this graphic account of his own encounter with the Old Hag:

I was awakened by the sound of my bedroom door opening. I was on my
side and able to see the luminescent dial of my alarm clock. It was 4:20
a.m. I heard footsteps approaching my bed, then heavy breathing. There
seemed to be a murky presence in the room. I tried to throw off the cov-
ers and get up, but I was pinned to the bed. There was a weight on my
chest. The more I struggled, the more I was unable to move. My heart was
pounding. I strained to breathe.

The presence got closer, and I caught a whiff of a dusty odor. The
smell seemed old, like something that had been kept in an attic too long.
The air itself was dry and cool, reminding me of the inside of a cave.

Suddenly a shadow fell on the clock. Omigod! This is no joke! Some-
thing touched my neck and arm. A voice whispered in my ear. Each word
was expelled from a mouth foul with tobacco. The language sounded
strange, almost like English spoken backward. It didn't make any sense.
Somehow the words gave rise to images in my mind: I saw rotting swamps
full of toadstools, hideous reptiles, and other mephitic horrors. In my
bedroom I could only see a shadow looming over my bed. I was terrified.

But I'm a scientist. I must see what it is. I suspected that it was a hallu-
cination; either the type that occurs in the twilight just before falling
asleep (hypnagogic hallucination) or the type that occurs just before
awakening (hypnopompic hallucination). All I would have to do is either
look at the image or touch it and it should vanish.

I signaled my muscles to move, but the presence immediately exerted
all its weight on my chest. The weight spread through my body, gluing me
to the bed. . . .

A hand grasped my arm and held it tightly. . . . The hand felt cold
and dead. . . .

136

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

Then part of the mattress next to me caved in. Someone climbed
onto the bed! The presence shifted its weight and straddled my body, fold-
ing itself along the curve of my back. I heard the bed start to creak. There
was a texture of sexual intoxication and terror in the room.

Throughout it all, I was forced to listen to the intruder's interminable
whispering. The voice sounded female. I knew it was evil. . . .

The intruder's heavy gelatinous body was crushing the life out of
me. ... I started to lose consciousness. Suddenly the voice stopped. I
sensed the intruder moving slowly out of the room. Gradually the pres-
sure on my chest eased. It was 4:30 a.m.

I sprang out of bed, grabbed a flashlight. . . , 54

Siegel flashed the beam around his bedroom, found nothing, called out,
"Who's there?"

Worried that the intruder had hidden somewhere in his house, he con-
ducted a room-to-room search. He found no one, of course.

Siegel has spent his adult life researching hallucinations and learning
how to distinguish them from reality. He has immersed himself in claustro-
phobic, water-filled sensory-isolation tanks and Vietnam-era-style "tiger
cages." He has studied the effects of hallucinogenic drugs on laboratory an-
imals, human patients, and eventually, so as to better understand their ef-
fects, himself. As he notes, hallucinations are not dependent upon "brains
seething with drugs or sliced apart by schizophrenia. . . . Questions of san-
ity and scientific naivete aside, if the hallucination appears real enough, any-
one could be fooled. After all, some hallucinations have all the sensory
qualities of real perceptions including sights, sounds, tastes and smells.
They appear just as concrete and 'out there' as real events." 55

So who — or what — was Siegel's "Old Hag"? Siegel explains:

The best explanation for my succubus experience was that I was in a state
of sleep paralysis and having a hypnopompic hallucination. The fact that
I saw images of rotting swamps concomitant with awakening was a strong
indication that some REM activity was continuing during the
hypnopompic period. But why the specific succubus or incubus image?
Jung believed it was a racial memory implanted in our genes eons ago
when our ancestors awoke in a dark cave and panicked at the presence of
a predator. Some contemporary psychiatrists believe it is a return to the
frightening, looming shapes of the infant's perceptual world. While such
explanations may account for the ubiquitous nature of the experience, it
is likely that the general features of the succubus are suggested to the
sleeper by specific physiological sensations. The brain tries to synthesize a
meaningful explanation from this material.

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137

What are these raw sensations, and how are they produced? Awak-
ening in a state of sleep paralysis can cause the person to hyperventilate
and experience feelings of tightness or heaviness in the chest. Hyper-
ventilation, even in the form of sighing respirations, also diminishes the
supply of oxygen to the brain. This can produce hyperacusis, whereby
sounds seem especially loud. Simple background noises, ticking clocks,
even one's own labored breathing can provide the seeds from which
grow more complex auditory hallucinations such as opening doors,
footsteps, and garbled voices. If the oxygen supply is sufficiently re-
duced, sexual pleasure centers in the brain may be affected for both men
and women. . . .

Intense efforts to move against the paralysis increase awareness of the
rigid muscles, the body lying in bed under the covers, and the perspiring
skin. In the hypnopompic brain, the restraint can turn into pressure from
a grasping hand, the covers become another body folding itself over the
sleeper, and the sweat nurtures gelatinous sensations complete with odors.
Even the movement of the mattress and creaking of the bed were proba-
bly the result of my own struggles, not the intruder's. Autonomic nervous
system changes in cardiac activity, skin temperature, and skin resistance
can make additional contributions to the tingling, sensations of cold, and
strong emotional responses.

Lying in my bedroom inside this paralytic terror, my brain was alert
to the most subtle stimuli. I couldn't move, but my brain was using all its
sensory modalities to probe the environment with intense scrutiny. Minor
stimuli, usually unnoticed, were perceived so acutely that the brain at-
tached major significance to them. For example, barely detectable shad-
ows are normal in my bedroom, where a streetlight can be seen from the
window. Looking through fear-dilated pupils, it would be easy to see these
amorphous shadows, like inkblots, evolve into looming shapes from the
id. And the smell of cigarette smoke, which periodically invaded my bed-
room from the apartment below, undoubtedly accounted for the percep-
tion of tobacco breath. The smoke usually entered via my bedroom
window, which was always open a crack, just enough to let in the cool air
I thought arrived with the looming shape. 56

"You don't have to have a medieval mind to see a succubus emerge
from all these data points," Siegel concludes. "One of the best 'fits' the
brain can make of these sensations is that someone or something is sitting
or lying on top of the body. Yet knowing all this will not necessarily dis-
pel the perceived reality of the succubus or the accompanying paroxysm
of terror." 57

As David Huff ord pointed out, the "Old Hag" phenomenon is cross-
cultural; and as Siegel wrote:

138

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

I was not the first to be terrorized by such an experience. Throughout his-
tory many people have reported attacks by the same intruder. I was right
when I said she smelled old. The Babylonians called her Lilitu, demoness
of the wind, who seduced men by night. The Jews called her Lilith, the
hairy night creature. She was the succubus of ancient Rome who leaped
upon the sleeper and rode him to love or death. Then, in the Middle Ages,
she became the witch Lamia. Finally, in Old Germany, she was known as
the mare, the old, ugly woman who sat on the chest of the sleeper and pro-
duced the evil dreams we now call nighzmares. is

So untold numbers of people, for untold numbers ofyears, from all over
the world, have described in effect the same experience of a monstrous fe-
male form — old, hairy, evil-smelling — who, seemingly following the same
sequence, mounts the individual's chest, crushing the breath from his body.
It is a hallucinatory episode so vivid and real, it has quite literally scared
some of its recipients to death.

I am struck by the parallels suggested by the seeming rigidity of the
sequences in the "Old Hag" phenomenon and the rigidity of the se-
quences reported in the alien abduction phenomenon by investigators
such as Dave Jacobs and Budd Hopkins. But then Gwen Dean, a Califor-
nia therapist, follows Hufford with a presentation containing even more
striking comparisons: the parallels found in ritual abuse and abduction
accounts.

"Although there is no satisfactory definition of ritual abuse," Dean be-
gins, "there are striking similarities between accounts of ritual abuse and
alien abductions." She throws a transparency on the overhead projector:

Abduction Accounts

Ritual Abuse Accounts

examining table

vs.

altar table

forced intercourse

vs.

ritual rape

scary eyes

vs.

scary eyes

babies important

vs.

babies important

out-of-body experience

vs.

out-of-body experience

wounds, scars, bruises

vs.

wounds, scars, bruises

amnesia

vs.

amnesia

observers

vs.

observers

fear of hypnosis

vs.

fear of hypnosis

forced against will

vs.

forced against will

feels like drugged

vs.

may be drugged

told you are special

vs.

told you are special

isolated from other humans

vs.

isolated from other humans

abducted at young ages

vs.

abducted at young ages

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139

In all, Gwen Davis tells us, she was able to find some forty-four parallels. It
is nearly ten p.m.; Davis tells us there will be more discussion of the paral-
lels tomorrow morning.

The third day of the conference is over.

As I walk back across the Harvard Bridge to my hotel on the Boston side of
the Charles River, I catch myself warily glancing up at the nighttime sky,
half-expecting to see a glowing orange-red disc.

Alone in my hotel room I turn on the TV in time to catch the news. A
large portion of the broadcast is devoted to the ongoing "Earth Summit,"
the popular name for the United Nations Conference on Environment and
Development in progress in Rio de Janeiro. President George Bush, re-
sponding to criticism that the United States is failing to take a leadership
role, answers that America's environmental record is "second to none," and
he calls for an "action plan" to avert global warming.

I half-listen to the news as I go back over my three days of conference
notes. I am again struck by the psychological profiles of the abductees: that
there is no evidence of any psychological or organic reasons for their expe-
riences; that they have average IQs, in fact are average in so many ways. The
unavoidable conclusion seems to be that they are ordinary people who have
had extraordinary experiences.

An item on the TV news catches my interest: the Vice President of the
United States, observing a spelling bee in Trenton, New Jersey, wrongly ad-
vised a contestant to add an "e" to his spelling of "potato."

I think about the abductees I have spoken with: that as off-the-wall as
the young Massachusetts housewife with her stories of "Zar" and of groups
of worlds working together may have seemed, Pat, the midwestern dentist's
wife who wrestled with an alien's arm, seemed dead-on. I think of Carol and
Alice and their image of trying to locate a parking meter in space; I am
moved by their obvious confusion and distress, the terror of Carol's flash-
back that drove her to seek refuge in a closet.

I think about Linda Moulton Howe. She is a respected journalist and
documentary filmmaker, and yet she seems to believe in a government
cover-up; in cattle being raised up beams of light into UFOs, where their
organs are excised with laser efficiency; in crop circle patterns being an alien
"grass-roots" attempt at communication. Linda started out as skeptical as I
am about this phenomenon.

I realize I don't know what to believe! Wow dots one explain the similar-
ities in the abductees' stories — the consistency of detail, structure, scenario?
What would prompt a woman to make up a story about an extraterrestrial

140 CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

creature trying on her high-heeled shoes? How does one explain Budd Hop-
kins's story of Linda Cortile being "floated" out of her twelfth-floor apart-
ment building into a hovering UFO before two cars of witnesses who
confirm her account? How does one explain John Carpenter's story of the
two women abducted in Kansas who, separately and unrehearsed, tell such
matching stories?

CHAPTER V

At the Conference

Day Four

Tuesday morning Dave Jacobs and I again have breakfast together at the
Eliot Hotel. "The key thrust of UFO research in the past has been the UFO
sightings," he tells me. "We knew everything there was to know about sight-
ings. There have been studies on the ground, trace cases, approximately
forty-eight gazillion multiple-witness sightings from unimpeachable
sources. And the sightings take a certain style of research — legwork, talking
to witnesses; the methodology has been all worked out. Consequently we
have amassed evidence not unlike a sledgehammer between the eyes. It is
massive, overwhelming evidence that UFOs exist.

"However, abduction research requires different methodology," he con-
tinues. "It is intensely personal as opposed to confirmation of sightings.
And the approach to the source is close to that of therapists. It often requires
hypnosis; but hypnosis has a myriad of problems. There are always accusa-
tions of confabulation, leading, distortions — Eddie Bullard is going to be
talking about that this morning."

Jacobs explains some of his discovery techniques. "A red flag during an
encounter narrative is 'I stopped the car and got out to take a look.' We gen-
erally know that's not <z//that happened. Under hypnosis the subject retells
the story: 'I got out of the car ... I got out of the car . . .' and you can hear
increasing anxiety in his voice. You are talking to him in the present tense:
'You are getting out of the car and what is happening? What do you see?'
And he starts telling you what he saw, and it is an abduction scenario."

J. Gordon Melton, a Santa Barbara, California theologian, is the morn-
ing's first presenter. His topic is "Religious Perspectives of Stories: Con-
tactees to Abductees." He reviews the contactees' reception: how following
their surfacing in the 1950s they were called hoaxers, frauds, fakes, and how

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CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

"channeling," which had started with the contactees, led to the New Age
movement.

"The overwhelming majority of contactees," he says, "were not seeking
contact. In fact, when it occurred, it interrupted their lives."

The contactees were for the most part unchurched people, he tells us. It
was not a religious quest, and yet spiritual messages emerged. "No ufologist
was ready to accept them. Their accounts were dismissed as cult-religious
speculation.

"Satanic ritual abuse stories and alien abduction stories," he continues,
"emerged at approximately the same time. And there are a number of par-
allels. The format of retrieved memories is similar." Gwen Dean, the
evening before, had come up with some forty-four parallels, I recalled.

Melton goes on to compare the impact of the ritual abuse and alien ab-
duction stories: listen to enough of them, he says, and you become con-
vinced the tellers are not lying. In both cases there are a large number of
independent accounts; people are telling similar stories with similar details
without knowing each other. Both stories have the same claims on the truth:
"If what they're saying isn't true, where is the story/trauma coming from?"
Both types of stories share the elusive nature of the causative: one cannot
with any certainty get from the satanic abuse story back to the group re-
sponsible for the abuse, just as one cannot get from the abduction story
back to the aliens. Both types of victims need support; there is a danger in
mixing research and therapy.

"As we begin to speculate on the reasons for abductions," he says, "it is
tempting to move into theology — and New Age theology at that, since the
New Age has the occult at its very root."

Somebody suggests the distinguishing feature between contactees and
abductees is that "contactees have a good time; abductees don't."

During the question period, seemingly out of the blue, John Mack asks,
"What are the criteria for evaluating information from the cosmos?"

Eddie Bullard next compares abduction reports to folklore narrative.
"Folklore is filled with beings that come from distant worlds," he says, and
mentions the lore of fairies and how "diminutive supernatural beings are
universal." He tells how fairies traditionally take people to subterranean
kingdoms; how the "faerie mound" rises out of the ground; how time moves
at a different rate with fairies; how they are always stealing children and
women, and cross-breeding occurs. It is a comparison he went into in more
detail in his report "Folkloric Dimensions of the UFO Phenomenon" for
the Journal of UFO Studies. In that report Bullard pointed out that there
have already been a number of comparative studies of the similarities be-
tween UFOs and older supernatural lore: "Jacques Vallee [Passport to Mag-

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143

onia, 1969] noted that many phenomena of UFO close encounters cor-
respond to the phenomena of fairy meetings," Bullard wrote. His report
continued:

The recognition of folkloric parallels to UFO events has become a sta-
ple element in the literature as researchers expand ever further on
Vallee's pioneering work. The dwarfish occupants reported in most
UFO landings have their parallels in the almost worldwide beliefs about
diminutive supernatural beings. Physical and mental effects of close
encounters such as mental time lapse, paralysis, or subsequent illness
resemble effects of encounters with ghosts, fairies, and demons. Fear of
kidnap by sorcerers in motor cars panicked Haitians in the 1940s, in a
predecessor to the current UFO abduction epidemic. The floating effect
reported by abductees compares with transvection phenomena among
17th-century witches; the bedroom intrusion of strange beings in the
night [compares] with incubus visitation. Even vehicle stoppages attrib-
uted to electromagnetic interference by UFOs are nothing new, since
supernatural beings often exerted similar effects on horses and even
bicycles. . . .

The bizarre, surreal abduction story has proved the richest hunting
ground for folklore parallels. Comparison has focused on imagery motifs,
narrative structure, and extended mythological patterns, most notably ini-
tiations and shamanic journeys. How closely folklore and UFO abduc-
tions parallel one another is perhaps best exemplified by shamanic
initiation: while the candidate is sick or entranced, his soul leaves his body
and meets two friendly companions. They accompany him into an un-
derworld where unfriendly demons capture the candidate and tear him
apart, then reassemble him with new knowledge and magical powers
added. A rock crystal inserted into his head gives him power, and further
inspection takes place in a domed cavern illuminated with a uniform but
sourceless light. When the initiate returns he may have been unconscious
for hours or days, and subsequently leads a changed life as a shaman, ca-
pable of healing, magic, and communion with the spirit world. Anyone
familiar with abduction reports readily identifies the shamanic equivalents
of time lapse, alien escorts, gruesome examination within the spaceship,
and life-transforming aftermath. Even the implanted electrode and uni-
form lighting in the examination room compare motif for motif among
Siberian and abduction stories alike.

These similarities seem too impressive to dismiss as chance, and
weighty with important clues about the ultimate nature of UFOs. Why
aliens should act like fairies or demons makes no sense outside of discred-
ited ancient-astronaut speculations, but a great deal of sense if UFO re-
ports are subjective experiences or supernatural fictions adapted for a
modern audience. So many parallels suggest as much. 1

144 CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

"The echo," Bullard tells us at the conference, "comes down to us
through history: 'No one is ever safe. Someone is going to get you!' — and
they do! When you're in bed, when you're driving your car at night."

Movies are another prime suspect as a possible source for abduction
stories, Bullard says, since science fiction films such as Invaders from Mars,
Earth Versus the Flying Saucers, and Killers from Space are shot through
with abduction stories. There is a possibility that people are picking up
these ideas and interpreting them, digesting them in abduction scenarios.
("Movies set a vivid precedent for the implant, domed room, dying
planet, and procreation problems of the abductors," Bullard noted in his
article. " The UFO Incident, a TV movie based on the [Barney and Betty]
Hill case, aired shortly before Travis Walton reported his abduction expe-
rience, which in turn received nationwide attention as a news event. Cov-
erage of abductions in various media, especially Whitley Strieber's case
[Strieber's writing about his abduction experiences in his books Commu-
nion and Transformation], has familiarized a large segment of the popula-
tion with this phenomenon." 2 ) "The similarities are there," Bullard points
out at the conference, "but are made only by extracting elements that are
similar from only parts of the stories. Fairies, for example, never examine
anyone!"

Someone rises to draw a wonderful parallel between abduction ac-
counts and J. M. Barries Peter Pan: the never-aging figure who comes down
from the sky and floats children out of their bedroom accompanied by a lit-
tle ball of light: Tinker Bell.

John Mack says heatedly, "I'm surprised nobody in this group has got-
ten up to say what we are dealing with here is radically different and has no
connection with folklore!"

Off to my right someone rises and says, "What we are dealing with is
radically different and has no connection with folklore."

Eddie Bullard next discusses what he refers to as "The Overstated Dan-
ger of Hypnosis." I am particularly interested in this, since so many ques-
tions arise over the validity of information gained in this manner.

The issue is that hypnotism many times is the only means of access to
an amnesiac abductee's experience. Something like 25 to 30 percent of the
abductees have conscious memories of their abductions; and these mem-
ories, incomplete and confusing, may consist simply of small, shadowy
figures at the foot of the bed, perhaps a strange medical examination while
lying naked on a table, an image of a white-glowing circular room, recur-
ring dreams of flying. It has become common procedure in UFO research
to use hypnosis to reach the unconscious mind, where, presumably, the
abductee's complete UFO experience would still be stored. Hypnosis has

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145

in fact been enormously successful in helping these individuals "recall"
their experiences. However, the use of hypnosis is also the basis for much
of the skepticism surrounding the validity of the abduction experience,
since, as most debunkers hasten to point out, there is always the criticism
that the hypnotist consciously or unconsciously influences the subject's
response. Bullard is fully aware of this. "According to the universal expert
opinion, hypnosis is no guaranteed way to the truth," he tells us. "They
speak of the subject's susceptibility and suggestibility, role playing, fol-
lowing the lead of the hypnotist. Therefore, the subject is likely to con-
fabulate fiction that is true, untrue, or partly true. Details may come out,
but the witness cannot distinguish between truth and falsehood. Experts
are unanimous in their discrediting of any hypnosis-based reality of what
happened.

"But if that were so," Bullard asks, "wouldn't all of Sprinkle's subjects see
easygoing aliens?* And wouldn't all of Hopkins's see dangerous aliens? In-
stead of what you would expect in taking samples, you get a reasonable mix.

"Hypnosis in some cases does produce a great deal of the account; but
in many more cases, without hypnosis, the accounts still emerge with sim-
ilarities that are striking." Bullard concludes, "Hypnosis is not a determin-
ing factor, but I'm sure we'll be hearing from the skeptics forever."

They will.

During the coffee break I take Mary, the Joe Nyman abductee, aside and ask
if I might speak to her about her previous night's comment, "I anticipate
with great pleasure working with the Gray aliens. I'm not left bereft by my
experiences. I give them my cooperation and my body, and they give me
their koan."

As we sit down facing each other on the lawn, she says, "I'd appreciate
it if you're going to use my account that you would alter my name."
"Would you like to choose one?" I ask.
Mary thinks for a moment, then says, "I'll take 'Darlene.' "
"Darlene?" I ask, surprised. "Why 'Darlene'?"

She laughs and explains, "Because it is about as far from the kind of
name I'd want for myself as possible."

* Dr. Leo Sprinkle, former professor in the University of Wyoming's counseling-
psychology department, founded the Rocky Mountain Conference on UFO Investigation
in 1980. In 1989, he was forced to resign his tenure when it became public knowledge that
he claimed to have been abducted by aliens as a child. Sprinkle believes the alien encoun-
ters are transformative journeys aimed at ultimately turning us into "cosmic citizens."

146 CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

Mary tells me she is a university graduate, a communications specialist
now working abroad, and that her first conscious recollection of her expe-
riences came three years earlier, during the summer of 1989.

"How many experiences have you had?" I ask. "Have you any way of
knowing that, or when they began?"

Mary takes a deep breath and exhales. "They began in this life when I
was a few hours old, and for all I know I've had hundreds," she says.

"When was the last one?"

"Two nights ago."

"During the conference?" I ask, although, in hindsight, I should not have
been so surprised.

"Yes," she says. "It was nothing out of the ordinary for me. I arrived
back at the motel where I was staying, and while preparing for bed I was
overcome with a feeling of apprehension — which is usually an indication to
me that something is going to happen."

I was reminded of Joe Nyman's earlier presentation on abductees' psy-
chological stages during an abduction. The Boston-area abduction investi-
gator had given as an example of the first stage a witness making excuses to
leave a gathering. "She arrives home and . . . feels a sense of urgency,"
Nyman had said, "a sense that someone is coming or that something is
going to happen. It is a premonition that something is going to happen in
a very short time."

"What form did this apprehension take?" I ask Mary.

"It's the feeling of being watched. That somehow something is coming.
Sometimes it's a feeling of anticipation, but more often I would call it a kind
of low-key dread. 'Apprehension' is a good word for it," she continues, "but
it's a nagging feeling in the pit of your stomach, like 'Okay, I've got to be
prepared for it.' "

During the second stage, the transition of consciousness from one's
normal waking state, Nyman had told us, the witness "notices the presence
of lights in the room that become a figure," or lights outside.

When Mary turned off her bedside lamp, she saw lights shining in her
motel bedroom window. She got up and discovered the source was a house
across the street. Someone had switched on a porch light. Relieved, Mary
climbed back into bed and lay there for a few minutes before she fell into
what she readily identified as a hypnagogic state — the state of drowsiness
preceding sleep.

"During that time," Mary tells me, "I heard voices conversing to each
other somewhere near my head on the left side. I perceived lights moving in
the room, and that's all the recollection I have."

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147

"Nothing else happened?" During the third stage, according to Nyman,
there takes place the psycho-physical imposition and interaction similar to
the abduction sequences Dave Jacobs has written about and reported.

"I believe that something else happened," Mary says, "but I'm very suc-
cessful at screening those experiences I'm not prepared to deal with."

"How is it possible? Can you just put them out of your mind?"

"Everybody has unconscious screening mechanisms: PTSD, the whole
thing," Mary explains. "Everybody has a way of protecting themselves from
the recall of experiences which demand to be integrated into their entire
human being, but which their consciousness or their perception of external
reality won't permit them to integrate easily or successfully. As a result, that
unintegrated material remains in your unconscious mind. When it's ready
to be dealt with, it will then emerge as a conscious memory, and at that
point," Mary says, laughing knowingly, "you undergo a paradigm shift. . . .

"Conscious acknowledgment of this experience," she continues, "look-
ing at it squarely and confronting your fears about it, effects a transforma-
tive change in your life. By that I mean it usually changes forever how you
perceive your reality. Now, to undergo this kind of thing all the time is re-
ally intense, and it's not always beneficial. So I have a mechanism that just
screens me from consciously acknowledging those parts of the experience
that I'm not yet prepared to put into a conscious frame of reference."

"In other words, you're able to forget what you're not ready to re-
member?"

She looks at me with a communication specialist's impatience with
oversimplification.

"How have your perceptions of reality changed?" I ask.

Mary laughs at my question. "I'm a well-adjusted person," she tells me.
"I've always been a well-adjusted person. A bit of a loner, too; but I'm highly
successful in my field, and I'm successful at presenting myself as a highly
functioning human being. But before I became aware of these experiences
in my life I would have described my 'reality' as being just about as strange
as anybody's acid trip on any day of the week."

I am wondering if I heard her right. "Acid trip" seems an odd, sixties
metaphor for Mary to have used.

"So this is just one more thing I have to deal with," she is saying. "Do
you remember the abductee, Pat, who said it was kind of like trying to de-
scribe to a blind person what 'red' looks like?"

I nod.

"This is what I've lived with all my life!" Mary says. "I wish you could
get inside my head and see it; it's fairly beautiful most of the time. But I see

148

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

things I'm aware that other people are not capable of seeing. And I experi-
ence things that other people would attribute to my being under the influ-
ence of some kind of hallucinogenic substance, or whatever. "

"Be specific now," I say. "What sort of things do you see?"

Mary takes a deep breath. She hesitates for a moment; then, looking be-
yond me over my left shoulder, she quietly says, "There's somebody stand-
ing by the tree over there."

"Somebody is there right now?"

"Um-hm," she says, nodding.

I twist around to look. I see nothing but the M.I.T. campus and trees.
I turn back to Mary. "You see somebody standing there, still?"

"Well, it's a shape. I can't see it clearly, but it's a shape."

To cover my own rising apprehension I ask, "Does what you see
frighten you?"

"No." She runs her hand through the grass. "Disembodied Beings are
real to me, so it doesn't frighten me."

"Why do you think that Being is standing by the tree?"

"I don't know! They're just standing there," she says with a tense little
laugh. "I mean, what do you want me to tell you about it?"

" They're just standing there? You mean there's more than one?" I turn
around for a better look.

"This person — or whatever it is — is standing there."

"Can you describe what this person looks like?" I ask, turning back to
Mary. "Obviously, I don't see it at all."

"I can't see it clearly," she says. "It's just a shape. It's just like a cloudy
form." Seeing my puzzled expression, she gives me another little laugh.

"All right, then let's talk about what you were saying at the conference."

"Okay!" she says with obvious relief, and bursts out laughing again.

"You said that you anticipated with great pleasure working with the
Gray Beings."

"Yes, I would say so," Mary replies thoughtfully. "The work I have done
with them has had many positive and beneficial effects on my life. So even
though the feeling that I have just prior to an experience might be called
dread or apprehension, I'm aware that that's the biological response — the
animal in me. I'm able to control my fear through my awareness that what
I'm feeling is simply similar to that of a rabbit in the woods cowering in fear
when a superior intelligence walks by. The rabbit can't tell whether that per-
son has good intentions or not; all the rabbit can tell is that it's afraid. So I
suppose the apprehension I have is simply the fear that has been pro-
grammed into my biology as a survival mechanism. But it can accelerate to
blind panic if I allow it to.

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149

"Bringing that fear under control," Mary says, darting a look over my
shoulder, "has been my task for quite a long time. But the more I'm able to
control my fear, the better iny experiences are. And so, to answer your ques-
tion, I do anticipate with pleasure working with them, because ..." She
pauses for a moment, then says with a sigh, "Because this has been a good
thing for me."

She doesn't sound convinced. "Why has it been good?" I ask.

"The more control I have over these experiences — these experiences
over which there is no control — the more empowered I am in my everyday
experiences to control the gross matter that I have to deal with in consen-
sus reality."

" 'Consensus reality'?"

"Yes. In what you would call reality."

I decide not to pursue this tack; instead I ask Mary to give me an ex-
ample of a koan.

" "What is the sound of one hand clapping?' " she responds.

"Well, yes," I say, "but what I was looking for was one the Beings had
given you."

Mary thinks for a moment. "If I asked them when my daughter Sarah
was a tiny baby how could I help Sarah deal with this experience, their reply
would be something like, 'You must listen very carefully when she speaks to
you.' This is a koan because, although to all practical intents and purposes
Sarah is capable of communicating on only a crude level, she is still so young
she can't tell me what's the matter. She can't communicate with me the way
I can communicate with you. And so if she is undergoing an experience, I
have to be listening not just with my physical senses but with something else
as well. The koan has just challenged me to experience my relationship with
my daughter on something other than a purely physical level."

"When, at the conference, you said you gave these beings your body
and cooperation, what did you mean?"

"Well, I consented to this right from the beginning. I've had the expe-
rience of dual reference — some people call it confabulation. I don't care if
it's confabulation or not — I know what I saw and I have to deal with that.
I identify with these beings. That's not necessarily a bad thing."

She begins to speak about how, as part of Zen Buddhism, there's the
practice of "identifying with deities" and expressing "compassion and un-
derstanding towards disembodied spirits" and how contact with the Beings
"is not a new human experience. It's just in a different frame of reference, a
more Western frame of reference, I guess," she says.

"I think what I meant, Mary, was on a more literal level. Have you given
them your body?"

150

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

"Yes," she responds. "I said yes to this. Yes. On a literal level, yes. I work
with them on a biological level as well as a spiritual level."
"Have they taken samples?"
"Yes."

;;E gg s?"

"Yes, probably," she says matter-of-factly. "I've had a couple of experi-
ences which would indicate to me that, yes, that's exactlyv/\iax they've done."

"And you've also experienced the classic 'medical examination' Dave Ja-
cobs writes about?"

"Yes, I've had those. The core experience for me," she says, "is very sim-
ilar to everyone else's: the abduction, the spacecraft, the examination table,
the sampling, the screen memories, all those things. Yes, I would say that
that's a fairly ordinary experience for me as well."

"How ordinary?"

"It doesn't happen every time, with every experience. I like to think of
it as the seventy-two-thousand-kilometer tune-up."
"Like maintenance?" I ask.

Mary smiles. "Yes, 'maintenance' is a good word for it."

The conference attendees are beginning to file back into the building. I
have time for one more question. "Do you think there's some sort of grand
design?"

Mary thinks for a moment. "If I'm looking at the grand design, I can't
perceive it. Let me put it this way. Imagine taking a pin and punching a hole
into a card and then holding that card up and squinting through the hole
at the room you're in. That's how well we can perceive the grand design —
that's how well I perceive it, anyway. The grand design is there, but I can't
make it out."

"Do you have any hint as to what this grand design might be?"
Mary is getting restless; she doesn't want to be late when the conference
resumes. "To learn not to fear," she says. "And to learn how to love."

When we return to the lecture hall, folklorist Eddie Bullard is discussing
Kenneth Ring's "Imaginal Realm" hypothesis and Ring's Omega Project ef-
fort to test near-death experiences (NDEs) against abduction experiences.
Ring believed experiencers of both these kinds of episodes were remarkably
similar types of people; that often they reported a host of other extraordi-
nary experiences throughout their lifetimes: psychic sensitivity, apparitional
observations, and out-of-body experiences. Ring suspected something in
common unites these people: the developmental pattern of their childhood
showed similar degrees of stress and awareness of alternate realities.

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1 5 1

According to Bullard, Ring traces extraordinary encounters to the
"Imaginal Realm" — "imaginal" not in the sense of unreal or illusory, but as
in an alternate reality that is objectively self-existing, with dimension, form,
and a population of its own. The Imaginal Realm, Ring says, is as real and
as rich as the sensory realm, but it is discernible only by people in alternate
states of consciousness. To see it requires imaginal or psychospiritual senses.
Bullard tells us that Ring believes people with "encounter-prone personali-
ties" possess these senses in unusual degree and glimpse imaginal reality
more often than "their less-gifted fellows."

"Like shamans, mystics and visionaries," Bullard continues, "they are
aware of experiencing a purer, more coherent reality than the empirical or
intellectual realm. A UFO abduction has the genuine, tangible properties of
a physical experience, but the aliens derive from contact with other — rather
than outer — space."

Ring suggests, according to Bullard, that imaginal experiences are some-
how linked to our concern for the environment. Abductees and Near-Death
Experiencers both report warnings about the fate of the earth and hints of dis-
aster. "Aliens treat us as we treat the world," Bullard says. "They suggest we
are going through our planet's near-death experience. Abductees stand at the
forefront of an evolution of consciousness, a global transformation that is
slowly gaining momentum, guided perhaps by external forces, or perhaps
from within, but always working to break down the narrow confines of pres-
ent consciousness and open it to a greater fullness. Abductees were the first to
be shown this, and they are going to lead us out and show us the way. The
shamans journey and the UFO abduction are parts of the same process. They
signal different ways of being in the world. Meanwhile the growing number
of extraordinary experiences mark the emergence of a redemptive form of
higher consciousness at a time of crisis for the earth and its inhabitants."

John Mack is on his feet. "I want to continue in my role as category
smasher," he says. "I object to either / or-ness! Aliens can literally exist and
come into our world, and we can have consciousness in different forms:
matter one moment, particles the next."

Behind me some of Joe Nyman's subjects, Mary among them, are cry-
ing out, "Yes! Yes.'YESl"

Michael Papagiannis, a darkly handsome Boston University as-
tronomer, next discusses the "Probability of Extraterrestrial Life on Earth."
He points out that "the universe is favorably predisposed to the origin of life
and the advancement of civilization.

"The universe has a billion billion sunlike stars," he says. "Therefore,
the possibility of life elsewhere is quite likely. The chemical composition of
the Earth and the stars is alike."

152 CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

Suddenly I am not listening. I am thinking that while astronomers with
devices, optical and otherwise, are looking deeper and deeper into outer
space, other scientists, also with devices, optical and otherwise, are looking
deeper and deeper into inner space. The paradox, as former Saturday Review
senior editor Susan Schiefelbein wrote in The Incredible Machine, is that
these scientists are discovering that "within our bodies course the same ele-
ments that flame in the stars. Whether the story of life is told by a theolo-
gian who believes that creation was an act of God, or by a scientist who
theorizes that it was a consequence of chemistry and physics, the result is
the same: The stuff of stars had come alive. Inanimate chemicals have
turned to living things that swallow, breathe, bud, blossom, think, dream." 3

How, over those billions of years in our primordial oceans' chemical
cauldron, did molecules fuse into chains that mixed and mingled in such as-
tonishing, infinite variety that suddenly somehow — because of lightning?
heat? ultraviolet light? — one of those chains became so utterly unlike any
other it came alive?

The explanation for this, the late essayist and physician Lewis Thomas
wrote, remains,

the greatest puzzle of all, even something of an embarrassment. Somehow
or other, everything around us today — all animals, ourselves, all plants,
everything alive — can trace its ancestry back to the first manifestation of
life, approximately 3.5 billion years ago. The first form of life was, if we
read the paleontological record right, a single bacterial cell, our Ur-ances-
tor, whose progeny gave rise to what we now call the natural world. The
genetic code of that first cell was replicated in all the cells that occupied
the Earth for the next 2 billion years, and then the code was passed along
to nucleated cells when they evolved, then to the earliest multicellular
forms, then to the vertebrates some 600 million years ago, and then to our
human forbears. The events that . . . [have taken] life all the way from a
solitary microbial cell to the convolutions of the human brain and the self-
consciousness of the human mind, should be sweeping us off our feet in
amazement. 4

It is amazing. More amazing, somehow, than the suggestion that there
must inevitably be intelligent life on other planets as well.

Several months after the conference I have a conversation with Budd
Hopkins in which he brings up Michael Swords, a professor at Western
Michigan University, who I only then learn was with us at M.I.T Swords,
according to Hopkins, "has done a lot of work on the extraterrestrial hy-
pothesis. Most scientists accept the idea that it is highly probable that there

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153

are planetary systems elsewhere and that many, many different kinds of suns
in the universe would have such planetary systems. Furthermore, the odds
of one planet in each of these systems existing in what they call the 'green
belt,' meaning not too far away from their sun to be too cold, is highly
likely.

"There are huge numbers of such suns," Hopkins continues, "and the
SETI [Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence] people accept all of this. But
as a biologist, Swords point out that if you pour two elements together in
Nebraska and the same two elements together in North Dakota, you're
going to get the same result. The basic law of science is: Given the same set
of circumstances, the same things happen. You get the same mixes . So the
assumption is that since we know from meteors that the building blocks of
life are prevalent, it's highly likely that life would develop.

"And what Swords points out," Hopkins says, "is that in accordance
with Darwin's theory of natural selection, when something develops that is
efficient, it is retained. Binocular vision, for example. It is present in octopi,
insects, vertebrates, and so on, so it would not be unusual to think of binoc-
ular vision developing and being retained when life developed on other
planets. Nor would it be unusual to think that other species would have
their brain and eyes close together and high up, nor an opposable thumb.
There are a number of biologists who have no interest whatsoever in UFOs,
but who assume that if life is developing elsewhere, it might very often take
a direction similar to the direction it has taken here.

"Now, the most interesting contribution Swords had made to this ar-
gument," Hopkins tells me, "has to do with breathing air. And although no-
body thinks of these alien creatures breathing air the way we do — you don't
see the chest move, you don't feel their breath, and so forth — they do have
some sort of use for oxygen, apparently. Swords points out that if the at-
mosphere of a planet had too much oxygen, there would be lightning-
caused wildfires burning out of control, and all kinds of other problems
which would virtually destroy the possibility of life developing. And if the
oxygen content of the planet's atmosphere is too low, fires won't burn. You
have to have enough oxygen to be able to control fire, because without the
use of fire, according to Swords, technology will not develop. So his theory
is that intelligent life will develop on planets with a certain particular range
of oxygen in their atmosphere. No more than such-and-such an amount, no
less than so-and-so. And if this were so, then this would imply that it would
be possible for visitors from one planet to breathe the air of another. It all
has to do with the notion of fire. All these things are theoretical, of course,
but they make a pretty strong point."

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One point being that at least scientists are thinking about these things.

Michael Swords's "green belt" is what other astronomers refer to as a
"continuously habitable zone," that narrow loop around a star in which an
orbiting planet can retain water on its surface without it either freezing solid
or boiling away. It is, of course, the zone in which our planet orbits the sun.
But at the 1993 annual meeting of the American Association for the Ad-
vancement of Science, M.I.T. astrophysicist Jack Wisdom suggested that
life on other planets might be a great deal rarer than we think. It is not
enough for a planet to orbit in Swords's "green belt"; it must also have a sta-
ble axis of rotation.

James Trefil, Robinson Professor of Physics at George Mason Univer-
sity, attended Wisdom's lecture and, writing in the Smithsonian column
"Phenomena, Comment and Notes," reported:

Earth's axis of rotation is an imaginary line that goes through the North
and South poles. At the moment, it is tilted at an angle of about 23.5 de-
grees from the vertical and describes a lazy circle in space every 26,000
years, much like the axis of a tilted, spinning top. This means that many
present features of Earth's climate — the alternation of seasons between
summer and winter, for example — have always been present.

But the story on Mars is quite different. [Dr.] Wisdom and graduate
student Jihad Tourma have found that the direction of its axis of rotation
moves around in space — in effect, its north pole points all over the map.
It seems that the other planets in the inner solar system don't have the
kind of stable axis of rotation that Earth enjoys.

Why doesn't Earth's axis flop around, too? The answer is simple ac-
cording to a team of French scientists led by Jacques Laskar of the Bureau
des Longitudes in Paris. Earth, unlike the other planets, has a moon that
is large relative to itself. It appears that the force that the Moon exerts on
earth — the same force that raises tides on the ocean — serves to stabilize
the direction of our planet's axis of rotation. Without the moon, our own
north pole would wobble around in space just as Mars' does.

So what would Earth have been without the Moon? Think about this:
the little i-degree wobbles of Earth's axis are thought to be crucial in ini-
tiating and ending ice ages. If the tilt angle got to be 54 degrees or more,
there would be actually more energy falling on the poles than on the
Equator. Given the exquisite sensitivity of Earth's biosphere to small
change, what would massive fluctuations like that do to the climate? It's
not hard to imagine such changes wiping out all life on the planet.

If this is the case, then our view of life in the galaxy may have to change
dramatically. In order for intelligent life to evolve, a planet has to form in
an orbit that . . . remains in the continuously habitable zone of its sun. But
in addition, perhaps, that planet has to have a large moon [Trefil's italics] .

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How many such planets can there be in the galaxy? Our present best
theory is that the Moon was formed as a result of a collision between the
newly formed Earth and a large asteroid. Such collisions during the for-
mation of planetary systems are surely unlikely, and my guess is that Earth
could well be the only planet in the Milky Way that satisfies both re-
quirements for life to develop.

If this is true, the conventional wisdom on extraterrestrials is wrong.
The galaxy isn't teeming with intelligent life waiting to communicate with
us. There may be no one out there. 5

At the M.I.T. conference, Michael Papagiannis closes his presentation
by stating, "UFO observations cannot be reproduced; therefore, there is no
hard scientific evidence. However," he pointedly adds, "the absence of evi-
dence is not evidence of absence."

I am reminded of what people here at the conference refer to as the Fermi
Paradox, after the nuclear physicist Enrico Fermi, who supposedly asked, "If
they're there, why aren't they here?" In other words, if advanced extraterres-
trial civilizations do exist on other planets, why haven't they already visited us?

Harvard physicist Paul Horowitz, like Fermi, is a skeptic. Before he is
willing to believe in aliens, he tells us, he'd like to see a "cigarette lighter, a
tailpipe, a piece of landing gear off a UFO. Something I can hold in my
hands!" Something, perhaps, like the "talking" robot he built as a teenager
and with which he won his Summit, New Jersey, high-school science fair.
"What we have is very poor evidence of extraordinary events," Horowitz
says, "and clear evidence of ordinary events."

Several years ago, in his early forties, Horowitz created a portable ultra-
narrow-band signal detector, the most advanced such machine ever built —
not that there then were all that many such machines. It is a device used in
conjunction with a radio telescope to search for any extraterrestrial intelli-
gent life's radio signals — a considerably cheaper and more effective way to
conduct a search than sending out planetary probes.

- There are a million sunlike stars within light-years (the distance light
travels in a vacuum in one year: approximately 5,878,000,000,000 miles) of
us, Horowitz points out; Proxima Centauri, the star closest to our sun, is
four and a third light-years away. The Andromeda Galaxy, the nearest galaxy
to our Milky Way, is two point two million light years distant from Earth.
Using our current rocket technology, we could reach Proxima Centauri
in 33,000 years; a visit to Andromeda would take fifteen billion years!
Horowitz's premise — that it is more practical to fund SETI to search for ex-
traterrestrial radio signals than to send rockets to explore — seems inar-
guable for the time being, even though, as philosopher Terence McKenna

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CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

has pointed out, "to search for a radio signal from an extraterrestrial source
is probably as culture-bound a presumption as to search the galaxy for a
good Italian restaurant."* 6

As the conference breaks for lunch, John Mack pauses at the doorway
leading out of the lecture hall and is immediately surrounded by members
of the media. At first he tries to duck their questioning. "I'd like to be the
person at the eye of the storm," he tells them, "but wisdom is knowing who
to talk to."

Someone calls out a question I do not hear. I do, however, catch Mack's
response: "These symptoms are real to the experience of the psyche," he
says. "But since we don't trust the psyche, we try to discredit the instrument
of the psyche. In other words, we try to find out what's wrong with these
people. We have to have an epistemology," he stresses, "that respects and in-
cludes the human psyche as an instrument of knowing. There is no evidence
that these abductees' stories are based on information they are getting from
each other. There has not been one bit of evidence presented that suggests
this phenomenon is any different from what the abductees are saying it is.
I trust they are knowing something really important here and that it is not
a product of their minds."

"If it is not a product of their minds, what is it?" someone asks.

"I have no idea," Mack says.

"You must have an opinion," someone else insists.

For a brief instant the Harvard psychiatrist looks wounded. "I will not
speak to that," he says, then feels a need to explain. "As long as we have an
epistemology and an ontology that responds to cigarette lighters," Mack
says, shaking his head at Horowitz's skepticism, "we don't have a legitimate
reality that will permit my reality to be heard."

A reporter starts to ask, "How does your reality differ from — ?" but his
question is cut off by Mack's announcement that he will not continue on
the record "at the risk of being thought cuckoo."

More questions areflungathim, and Mack holds both hands up, palms
out. "No more," he says. "The best way to advance in this field, unless you

* On October 12, 1992, three and a half months after the M.I.T. conference, as-
tronomers began the first comprehensive high-technology search for evidence of intelligent
life elsewhere in the universe. No longer named Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence
(SETI), but the less acronymic High Resolution Microwave Survey, this investigation, em-
ploying newly developed electronics, more sensitive radio receivers, and the most powerful
telescopes to monitor millions of microwave channels through radio-telescopes throughout
the world, was symbolically commenced on the five hundredth anniversary of the day
Columbus stumbled onto the New World. So far, no intelligent life on other worlds has
been detected.

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157

want to draw lightning to yourself, is you don't stand up in a field without
trees holding a piece of metal over your head. I'm not looking to attract
sound-bite backlash."

As Mack hastily makes his exit, one disgruntled journalist near me mut-
ters, "If one of those higher beings conducted an interview with me and two
physical scientists, it would all have far more potential and significance than
anything we're hearing here!"

I would be inclined to agree with him but for the fact that, as John
Mack has just so succinctly said, "there has not been one bit of evidence pre-
sented that suggests this phenomenon is any different from what the ab-
ductees are saying it is." And since what the abductees are saying is that
humans are being abducted by creatures from another world — or worlds — who
are coming to our planet in UFOs, what continues to hold my interest is why
a respected Harvard professor of psychiatry would for one minute believe
such a thing.

In the fall of 1989 a psychologist friend and colleague of John Mack offered
to introduce him to Budd Hopkins. Mack, unfamiliar with either Hopkins's
name or his work, asked who he was. The woman explained that he was a
New York artist who worked with people who reported alien Beings had
taken them aboard spaceships. Mack told her he was not interested: as he
later explained, he assumed both Hopkins and his clients shared "some sort
of delusion or other mental aberration." 7

Several months later, on January 10, 1990, Mack was in New York on
unrelated business and, more out of curiosity than anything else, he did visit
Hopkins. He came away impressed with Hopkins's "sincerity, depth of
knowledge, and deep concern for the abductees whom," Mack felt, "had
often been incorrectly diagnosed and inappropriately served by mental
health officials." 8

What changed Mack's mind about Hopkins and his clients, he reported,
was what has clearly affected so many others who have become acquainted
with Hopkins's data: "The internal consistency of the detailed accounts by
different individuals from various parts of the country who would have had
no way to communicate with one another and whose stories had emerged
only with difficulty, accompanied by distressing emotions." 9

Shortly after that meeting with Hopkins, John Mack returned to the
New York artist's studio and met for the first time with several abductees.
The consistency of their narratives again impressed Mack: the similarity of
the manner in which they were brought to and released from the spacecraft;
their depictions of the aliens; the manner in which they described the inte-

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CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

riors of the ships, themselves, and what had happened to them once they
had been taken aboard. At this time there had been very little detailed in-
formation of this nature available from the media. Face-to-face with the ab-
ductees, Mack was also struck, he later reported, "by the absence of any
obvious mental illness or emotional disturbance other than the traumatic
sequelae of the abductions themselves. No obvious explanation that could
account for the abduction reports was apparent then." 10

Nor, judging by his doorway response at the conference, did Mack feel
any obvious explanation had emerged since.

Hopkins, who already knew of abductees in the Boston area, asked
Mack if he would be willing to see some of them himself. As much out of
an awareness that those people required help and understanding of a more
professional caliber than they were getting as from his conviction that the
phenomenon "reflected a mystery of more than clinical interest," Mack
agreed to take some of Hopkins's referrals.

"The first cases that were referred to me in the spring of 1990," Mack
subsequently wrote, "confirmed what Hopkins, David Jacobs, Leo Sprinkle,
John Carpenter, and other pioneers who were investigating the abduction
phenomenon had already discovered. These individuals reported being
taken against their wills, sometimes through the walls of their houses, and
subjected to elaborate intrusive procedures which appeared to have a repro-
ductive purpose. In a few cases they were actually observed by independent
witnesses to be physically absent during the time of the abduction. These
people," Mack continued, "suffered from no obvious psychiatric disorder,
except the effects of traumatic experience, and were reporting with power-
ful emotion what to them were utterly real experiences. Furthermore these
experiences were sometimes associated with UFO sightings by friends, fam-
ily members, or others in the community, including media reporters and
journalists, and frequently left physical traces on the individuals' bodies,
such as cuts and small ulcers that would tend to heal rapidly and followed
no apparent psychodynamically identifiable pattern as do, for example, re-
ligious stigmata.""

Two and a half years later, by the time the M.I.T. conference was being
organized, Mack was being referred to individuals through others involved
in the UFO abduction phenomenon. He was also counseling persons who,
having heard him speak in public on the subject or having read of his in-
terest in the phenomenon, had contacted him directly. For example, each
time Mack appeared on the radio or television, or there was an article about
him in, say, Harvard Magazine or the Wall Street Journal, he would receive
telephone calls or correspondence from prospective cases in a segment of
the population that otherwise might not have approached him. Still others,

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159

prompted by seeing Mack's credit line on the televised Intruders miniseries,
made from Budd Hopkins's book, felt brave enough to contact him, too.

They came forward hesitantly, timidly, rationalizing that if this Harvard
professor was willing to risk saying this phenomenon should be taken seri-
ously, then they might at least hazard telling him about those childhood ex-
periences their parents had dismissed as "just a bad dream" or "a nightmare"
or the result of "too vivid an imagination" instead of anything real. These
individuals, however, had always known those experiences hadn't been
dreams; they had been real. But they hadn't wanted to say so, or hadn't been
brave enough to say so, until this Harvard professor dared intimate that
those experiences they were so afraid of might in fact be true.

They, too, were familiar with risk. In almost every instance, Mack
learned, when these individuals had tried to share their experiences with
someone in their workplaces or among their own families — even if some of
those family members were abductees themselves — they were met with si-
lence or ridicule. And, in the phrase some of the abductees had used at the
M.I.T conference, they had learned to "go underground" with what had
happened to them.

Almost universally the abductees were afraid to come forward. Even
Mack was surprised by the subterfuge he would sometimes have to submit
to before an experiencer would speak with him. In one case, an abductee
first wrote Mack a letter giving him a post-office box in a strange town in
which the abductee did not live and instructed Mack to write him there.
The letter was signed with an assumed name. Only when Mack seemed to
satisfy the writer's need for anonymity did the experiencer permit open con-
tact. And in Mack's experience, the more prominent the individual ab-
ductees might be — whether by their own definition or in terms of their
communities — the more likely they were to want to disguise themselves to
prevent any chance of public recognition.

Despite this reluctance, by May 1992 Mack had seen more than fifty
"possible" abductees, thirty-eight of whom fulfilled the set of selection cri-
teria set out by Mark Rodeghier, CUFOS's director of investigations, on the
first day of the M.I.T. conference. Of those thirty-eight, twenty were female
and eighteen were male. The adults ranged in age from nineteen to fifty-six
years old; one of Mack's subject was a two-year-old boy. And even though
Mack offered support and counseling to these individuals, he always felt
that his role was "as much that of a co-investigator as a therapist." 12

Small wonder that Mack, too, could be evasive. When the reporter at
the conference asked Mack if the abduction phenomenon was not the prod-
uct of the abductees' minds, then what was it, Mack had not been entirely
honest when he had responded, "I have no idea."

160 CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

Wisdom, as Mack said, is knowing who to talk to; and the cautiousness
of his answer reflected his unwillingness to risk being thought cuckoo by
those of the media gathering for "sound bites" at the lecture-room door. But
one hint of Mack's ideas lay in his observation "We don't have a legitimate
reality that will permit my reality to be heard."

He was suggesting that his reality was less limited than Horowitz's or
the media's.

After lunch, Ron Westrum, a Michigan Ph.D., speaks about the "Social Dy-
namics of Abduction Reporting." He compares the acceptance process in
the UFO arena to the skepticism and ridicule encountered in the late eigh-
teenth and early nineteenth centuries by those who reported that meteorites
fell to the earth from outer space.

On July 24, 1790, a number of meteorites fell near Agen, in southwest-
ern France. The phenomenon was seen and documented by no fewer than
three hundred people. Even though meteorite fragments were exhibited,
Pierre Betholon, editor of the Journal des Sciences Utiles, after publishing his
account of the event in 1791, dismissed the reports as groundless and phys-
ically impossible.

Early in the morning of December 14, 1807, a huge fireball swept over
New England and crashed into the earth near the town of Weston, Con-'
necticut. Benjamin Silliman, then professor of chemistry at Yale College,
and college librarian James L. Kingsley collected many fragments of the me-
teorite, including a chunk weighing approximately two hundred pounds.
When sample pieces from the Weston meteorite shower were brought to
President Thomas Jefferson, he remained skeptical of their origin. The re-
mark attributed to him, however, is probably apocryphal: "It is easier to be-
lieve that two Yankee professors would lie than stones fell from heaven."

It is, of course, also easier to believe that a Harvard professor would lie
than that aliens are visiting Earth.

During the question period, Sacramento psychologist Richard J. Boy-
Ian rises. I am so stunned by his query's preface, "As an experiencer my-
self ..." I do not hear what his question is. I cannot recall Boylan having
made any mention of his being an abductee before, and judging by the mur-
mur in the lecture hall, no one else in the audience was aware of it, either. I
make a note to speak with him as soon as possible.

McGill University's D. C. Donderi speaks next, on the need for "Sci-
entific Intelligence Approach to Abduction Evidence." He throws up on the
screen a slide of an AT&T advertisement from a then-current issue of Sci-
entific American depicting golfers in a golf cart being floated up into a hov-

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16 1

ering UFO. In the text accompanying the illustration, AT&T, pushing its
own cellular phones, asks whether at times such as this you would be will-
ing to settle for a competitor's inferior model. It's a clever advertisement if
one overlooks the fact that if all the reports of electromagnetic interference
during close encounters is true, AT&T's cellular phone wouldn't be work-
ing, either. Donderi's point, however, is that the abduction phenomenon
has by now been so desensitized it is has entered contemporary society's
mainstream. More recent examples of the commercialization of the phe-
nomenon are the Bud Lite beer television commercial of glowing little
aliens with big heads (and bikinis and dark glasses!) dancing to a boom box,
and the Colombian coffee print advertisement showing a photograph of a
UFO over someone's house with the caption "We know why they're here."
(Neither of these examples, however, is as mainstream as Cheney's New
Yorker cartoon depicting four Small Grays carrying a man from his bed
while his blase wife asks, "You want me to tape Murphy Brown for you?")

Donderi is saying that the abduction experience does not stand alone,
that its hypothesis "is made more plausible by the Close-Encounters-of-the-
Third-Kind hypothesis, which, in turn, is made more plausible by the UFO
hypothesis. First came the witness accounts," Donderi continues, "then came
the multiple-witness accounts, and then came the corroborative accounts."

Donderi is engaging in what I have heard referred to at this conference
as Bayesian analysis: If the first part is true (that UFOs exist) , then the sec-
ond part (that CE-III encounters exist) is probable; therefore the third part
(that abductions are really taking place) is more probable still.*

But, Donderi asks, "what evidence do we see of time having changed
the phenomenon? How can they be 'high-tech' aliens if they've used the
same technology for forty years? We should talk to people who were ab-
ducted forty years ago!" More to the point, I think, is why these Beings
should need to repeat, in effect, seemingly the same experiments for so long
a period of time. It is a question even the most fervent believers in UFOs
have difficulty answering.

At the conclusion of Donderi's presentation, John Mack rises to ask,
"What does it mean that we don't come across cases from Africa and Asia?
Is it because they don't deal so sharply with distinctions between the physi-
cal and the paranormal?"

I thought Bullard had said there werecases from Asia. I go back over my
notes. Bullard listed one in Japan and three in China as "vaguely reported."

* "But there is a catch," journalist Keith Thompson has pointed out. "The converse of
[the Bayesian] theory is necessarily invoked: If any aspect of the UFO phenomenon is not
true, then any of the rest of the reported phenomenon also may not be true." 13

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CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

But I like where Mack's question is leading: societies that do not make sharp
distinctions between the real world and the spirit world might not see in the
abduction phenomenon anything worth reporting.

During the afternoon break, following Donderi's presentation, I hurry out
into the hallway to find Richard J. Boylan so that I might set up an ap-
pointment to talk to him about his being an abductee. I am told the Sacra-
mento psychologist escaped the lecture hall and the building "in a very bad
mood." Evidently I am not the only journalist who wants to speak with
him. In the absence of Boylan, I seek out John G. Miller, the emergency-
room physician who had addressed the conference the first day on the pro-
cedural differences between "alien" and "human" physical examinations. I
admired Miller because he weighed the evidence for this phenomenon as
thoughtfully and carefully as he might examine a patient. I further liked
him because he seemed as confused by the abduction experience as I was.

When Miller and I are seated together on the lawn, I ask him the ques-
tion that, by now, I am constantly asking myself: "What do you think is
going on?"

"I don't have any fixed opinion," Miller replies. "How can a person have
any firmly held belief about this when it's so mysterious? The opinions of
the true believers are hard to swallow; and the opinions of the die-hard skep-
tics are not based on reality, either. There is some middle ground." He
thinks for a moment, and then he says, "It's clear that this is some sort of
powerful subjective experience. But I do not know what the objective real-
ity is. It's as if the evidence leads us in both directions."

His involvement with the phenomenon, Miller tells me, came about be-
cause a fellow physician had so many patients reporting abduction-related
complaints he couldn't handle them all. The doctor then had asked Miller
if he would see two of his cases.

"The first one was just a very reasonable man who had a very strange
story," Miller explains. "I didn't use hypnosis — I don't use hypnosis — but
from what this man could recall of his childhood and growing up, he had
had these experiences with these Beings. And," Miller adds pointedly, "he
clearly was not mentally ill — at least not to my level of being able to evalu-
ate it. He just wanted to tell me his story — not for money, not to become
famous or anything else. He just needed to tell his story to somebody who
would listen, that's all."

This same patient, Miller tells me, was subsequently examined by Dr.
Jo Stone-Carmen, who had written her doctoral thesis on abductees. (The
day before at the M.I.T conference, Stone-Carmen reported in her presen-

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tation, "Abductees with Conscious Recall Are Different," on abductees'
high vigilance and guardedness.) Using what she called a phenomenologi-
cal approach to her study of abductees, Stone-Carmen administered Miller's
patient a MMPI, along with several other tests designed to calibrate an in-
dividual's personality characteristics. They were the same tests she had given
the subjects of her dissertation. Stone-Carmen was unable to find any evi-
dence of psychopathology in Miller's patient.

"I guess the core of the mystery is the incredible stories coming from
credible witnesses," Miller tells me. "And the fact that these incredible sto-
ries are reasonably consistent from witness to witness."

"Also, as you noted in the experiencer you sent to Jo Stone-Carmen,
there is nothing to be gained for these witnesses by telling these stories,"
I say.

"Right," Miller says, nodding. "In fact, I've known a number of wit-
nesses where it would be extremely detrimental for them to tell these sto-
ries. I've met witnesses in the Los Angeles area who are very highly placed
in businesses and professions, for whom it would be utterly disastrous to
come forward with these stories."

"Has anybody been hurt by these experiences?" I ask. "Temporary
trauma, certainly, but have you found any physical evidence?"

"I would say a lot of people have been traumatized by them, because if
they were free of trauma these people wouldn't be seeking help. I'm talking
here about mental trauma. But physical trauma? I've heard the allegations,
but, again, I just don't know."

"Dr. Miller, have you ever seen hard evidence of any kind with these
people?"

"It depends on what kind of hard evidence you want," Miller replies.

"I guess like Paul Horowitz was saying at the conference — a cigarette
lighter or a piece of landing gear from a UFO, or an implant."

"Well, one highly credible witness that I worked with in LA. had an
overnight change in the grass in her backyard in a pattern similar to what
was reported by Budd Hopkins in one of his cases. The soil and the grass
changed in a circular pattern behind their home. But what this means, I
don't know. I mean, a skeptic would say, 'Well, what you've got is dry dirt
and dry grass — big deal,' you know?"

Carol and Alice are sitting outside on the lawn, too. When Dr. Miller
and I finish, I walk over and join them. I am relieved to see they are begin-
ning to feel more comfortable with me and do not automatically stop talk-
ing about the conference when I am around. I ask if they are taking part in
the next session, the abductees' panel discussion on how to handle the
media. They are not.

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CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

When we reassemble in the lecture hall, the abductees want to talk about
something else.

One woman abductee says, "There seems to be an investigative bias.
They look for things in their investigations that support their theory and
'gray-box' what does not fit."

"We feel vulnerable and out of control, that we are victims," another
female abductee tells us. "Give us control. Help us to gain confidence. Give
us something to show us we aren't victims of anything but our own fears."

One of the men who has had experiences since childhood says that
coming to this conference has been very good for him, that it has created an
environment in which he has felt less alone. "I kept my mouth shut for forty
years," he says, "and I appreciate your thoughtfulness. We — the experi-
ences, the investigators, the therapists — are all part of the same phenome-
non. We are the human link. And we are as strong as our weakest skeptic
and as weak as our strongest supporter. You have to be accepting and non-
judgmental of what we tell you. We are all part of a team. And the name of
the team? Take the first the first letter of the word 'experiencer' and the first
letter of the word 'therapist.' The name of the team is 'ET.' "

Richard Price, the abductee whose "implant" has been studied, says he
feels "taken advantage of when people are writing about me." He suggests
the establishment of a 1-800 telephone number so that experiencers can
have a means of getting in touch with other members of a group.

Another man speaks softly of his difficulty in Maine "of trying to find
someone to talk with. I wrote Budd Hopkins, who referred me to Joe Nyman.
There needs to be a compendium of researchers that witnesses can go to," he
says, then adds, "and investigators. Keep in mind that when we come to you,
there are not many other places to go. And if I feel you are not prepared to lis-
ten to what I'm telling you right now because it's not part of your agenda . . ."
he says, then scowls and shakes his head. "I've come up with things that have
hit Joe [Nyman] in my sessions and he was willing to put his butt on the line
and absorb it." He pauses for a moment, then says that he had intended to say
something about what he thought was happening, but felt he had already
taken up too much time. "In brief," he says, "I can remember sitting around
with other bunches of experiencers and we all feel something really big is com-
ing up. And what is coming up, I feel, has now started."

Virginia, the Boston-area abductee who is one of Joe Nyman's people,
speaks next. Earlier we learned she has had bedroom visitations and, as a
child, was introduced to her cloned sister by aliens in a "sky house." "Peo-
ple who are traumatized should not go on TV shows," she warns. "Instead

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it should be people who have more control. We all start off anxious,
depressed, looking for people who will validate us. We all need a good
therapist. Guidelines are needed for how a therapist should proceed with
someone."

David Cherniack from the Canadian Broadcasting Company suggests
that any experiencer contemplating going on TV should "watch your mar-
ket" and avoid exploitive television programs.

There is no prearranged dinner for this, the final night of the conference. A
group of us who have been covering it for various publications or programs
have decided to eat together for an informal discussion of what we think.
There is David Cherniack; Karen Wesolowski, the special projects manager
for the Atlantic Monthly; Margaret West of National Public Radio in Wash-
ington; Steve Fishman, author of A Bomb in the Brain, who has been cover-
ing the conference for Details; and myself.

We gather together in the hallway outside the lecture room to decide
where to eat, and suddenly there is Richard Boylan wandering past by him-
self, looking somewhat at loose ends. Despite his reported ill humor earlier,
he seems both both grateful and pleased by our invitation to join us. And
to my surprise, our discussion that evening is not about the conference but
an off-the-record (later made on-the-record) account by Boylan of a "six-
state grand tour of reported Southwest secret sites" he had taken in his
Chevrolet S-io Blazer ten weeks earlier, in April, which had further con-
vinced him that the UFO phenomenon is the subject of a massive and long-
lasting government cover-up.

During that "grand tour" Boylan had visited the Tonopah, Nevada,
USAF Air Defense Command Headquarters; the Tonopah Test Range; and
Areas 51 and S-4 at the northeast corner of Nellis Test Range (the Groom
and Papoose Lakes bases). Boylan had then continued on to Archulete Peak,
just north of Dulce, New Mexico, near the Colorado border; from there to
the three huge Los Alamos National Laboratories, which stretch five miles
by thirteen miles over most of Los Alamos County; and to Kirtland Air
Force Base outside Albuquerque, which houses the Western Regional Head-
quarters of the Department of Energy (Strategic Defense Initiative) , the
Sandia National Laboratories, the Defense Nuclear Agency headquarters,
and the DOE's National Atomic Museum. He stopped at Sunspot, New
Mexico, where the National Solar Observatory is located atop Sacramento
Peak along with the Army Sacramento Peak Frequency Surveillance Station.
From Sunspot Boylan had proceeded to the National Radio Astronomy

166 CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

Observatory's Very Large Array of twenty-seven huge eighty-two-foot-wide
receiving dishes on the plains of San Augustin in New Mexico and eventu-
ally to the Northrop "saucer plant" near Lancaster, California.

Boylan made this trip because, he tells us during dinner, "for several
years articles have been appearing about secret government bases where ex-
otic space weapons and American-made saucers are built and tested. But
the testimony about these sites and saucers was always 'off the record' or
from 'sources who cannot be named.' So I was determined to go see for
myself.

"I really see this whole controversy as having three legs, like a three-
legged stool: the UFO phenomenon; the extraterrestrial-contact phenome-
non; and the U.S. government cover-up phenomenon," Boylan explains.
"And by 'cover-up' one might expand it to include armed response or Strate-
gic Defense Initiative response. 'Cover-up/SDI' is the third leg of the stool.
And during my trip I got both very large confirmation that they, the U.S.
government, were a lot farther along with Star Wars weaponry and physics
and ability to deliver the goods than I had earlier come to know even from
anything I had seen published."

"Where had you seen things published?" I ask

"In articles in the LA Times, various magazines such as Aviation Week
and Space Technology, Popular Mechanics, UFO Magazine, and MUFON
Journal. I found many useful leads in Howard Blum's excellent book, Out
There, as well as Timothy Good's essential Above Top Secret. I also sifted out
as best I could the information from the disinformation in William Hamil-
ton Ill's Cosmic Top Secret. Are you familiar with that book?"

"I'm afraid not," I admit.

"On its back cover is a computer-enhanced photograph taken by Gary
Schulz which quite clearly reveals a bright orange-colored glowing flying
disc with a cupola on top. That was taken along the same Area 51 boundary
of Nellis Air Force Base that I went to and saw much the same thing."

"You saw a disc there, too? Did you photograph it?" I ask

"Them," Boylan corrects me. "I saw more than one. But I couldn't
photograph them from the distance I was. They would have looked like stars
at best They were too many miles out and I had too-inferior equipment
Schulz has a much better photo, and another guy, Issuro Isokawa, took a good
photo, too. These guys have much better telephoto lenses on their cam-
eras. . . . But it's not just the discs. It's the things I saw on this trip like the fact
that we have fusion reactors — miniaturized, contained, self-sustaining — and
have had them for a number of years. Seven years, anyway."

"Dr. Boylan," I say, "how would you recognize a miniaturized fusion re-
actor if you saw one?"

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167

"I'm not sure I would," he replies, smiling. "I'm just taking the gov-
ernment's information at face value. They're the ones disclosing; I'm not
deducing. You go to the National Atomic Museum in Albuquerque and
very insightfully read every bit of every exhibit and remember everything
you've read and put it together, you'll find a number of interesting things —
among them that a hundred-trillion-volt electromagnetic pulse capability
has now been achieved. Those are just flat-out announced bits of data
they've put out.

"And then there's the Department of Energy facility out at Tonopah
Test Range," Boylan continues, "and the extreme security at Kirtland Air
Force Base out at Albuquerque, where they've got electrified fences and
double-door personnel chambers you have to enter, keypunch a code, then
pass through to get into the building. All those 'One Year, $10,000 Fine'
warnings if you trespass, you know? All that apparatus of extreme military
security on a so-called Department of Energy facility — a headquarters, no
less, not even an operational lab. I was just impressed by how much infor-
mation one can get on how far along we are in exotic weaponry even with-
out a high security clearance. And then, seeing our saucers both made and
test-flown at the construction site and then hard-tested at the military prov-
ing grounds demonstrated to me that not only are there UFOs flying
around and obviously crashed and retrieved, but that we've hijacked their
technology, either on our own or with extraterrestrial help, and have our
own primitive Piper Cub sort of UFO stuff in the air putzing around."

"You're saying the discs you saw were our own saucers?" I ask.

"Yeah," he says matter-of-factly. "There's no reason to believe such
crudely flown vehicles would pop up from the ground at Area 51 as some
sort of alien disinformation campaign."

I look at the others around the table. "Maybe you'd better start at the
beginning," I say.

"At the beginning of what?" he asks.

"At the beginning of your trip."

Boylan tells us his first objective had been the tiny town of Tonopah,
Nevada: "Gateway to Black Budget aerospace/SDI projects," he says, then
adds, "Of course, Albuquerque is the other gateway; and if you draw a line
between the two, most Black Budget aerospace/SDI projects, according to
my research, are built, tested, and based between these two towns."

Boylan pulls out of his jacket pocket a packet of color snapshots and be-
gins sorting through them. "Although Tonopah's economy is ostensibly
based on mining," he is saying as he selects the photograph he wants, "it
houses an Air Force Defense Command Headquarters." He slides the pho-
tograph of an anonymously governmental-looking building across the table

168 CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

to me. A sign on the building identifies it exactly as Boylan has said. "This
is a paradox," he continues, "since Nellis Air Force Base, the nearest official
U.S. Air Force facility, is 180 miles to the south — unless, of course, there is
a secret USAF presence at the north end of Nevada, which there is."

He slides a second photo across. It shows a dull-blue school bus marked
"Shuttle to Sandia."

"I also spotted this while I was in Tonopah, Nevada. This is very inter-
esting, since the Sandia National Labs is two states away in Albuquerque,
New Mexico — unless, of course, there is a secret Sandia presence nearby.
Which there is.

"From Tonopah, I drove east fifteen miles on U.S. 6 to the turnoff for
the Tonopah Test Range." He slid a third photograph across to me; it was
of the Tonopah Test Range entrance sign, depicting a small Hawk-type
solid-fuel ground-to-air rocket. "You will notice," Boylan is saying, "that the
sign misleadingly gives the impression that they test small rockets there. But
after driving twelve miles south on the entrance road, I came to a huge,
sprawling base operated not by the Department of Defense but by Sandia
National Laboratories for the DOE. And according to a Sandia National
Labs public relations officer with whom I spoke, 'Sandia National Labs is
AT&T' In other words, AT&T is the corporation behind the application
of physics research to Star Wars weapons. When AT&T 'reaches out and
touches someone,' " he says with a wry smile, "it may be with one of their
electromagnetic pulse weapons.

"By the front gate are thirty large, two-story buildings where test-range
workers are quartered," he continues. "And through binoculars — seven-by-
thirty-five-power — I could see downrange approximately five miles where
an additional, equally large complex of buildings was located. Here, to the
south and east, extend hundreds of square miles for operation testing of
such DOE weapons as the electromagnetic pulse, particle beam, tactical nu-
clear, and laser devices. Strategic nuclear devices, by the way, are tested one
hundred miles further south at the Nevada Test Site, another DOE facility,
while the U.S. -made saucers are test-flown one hundred miles to the south-
east, at Groom and Papoose Lakes bases."

The Tonopah Test Range guards wore desert camouflage "jumpsuits,"
Boylan tells us, "with a cryptic shoulder patch reading ASI-SWAT' " He
shows us a photograph of a convoy of military two-and-a-half-ton trucks
being let through the gate. The lead trucks are already turning downrange.

"When I approached the main gate on foot," Boylan says, "the two
guards were surly and aggressively poised. Their weapons looked like a
fat, black cylindrical, oversized rifle stock about five inches in diameter and

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a yard long, but there was no barrel or muzzle at the end. And although
I am familiar with the appearance of U.S. and international, military, po-
lice, and elite-unit weapons, I had never seen anything like these strange-
looking weapons before. Not wanting to experience this weapon pointed
any closer at me, I accepted their refusal to let me pass through, and
retreated."

Boylan left Tonopah and drove eighty miles east on State Highway 375
to Rachel, a small Nevada community composed predominately of mobile
homes for workers at Area 51 of the Nellis Air Force Base test range. Rachel's
popular watering hole is the Little A "Le" Inn Bar and Restaurant, its walls
cluttered with Air Force patches, UFO photographs, drawings, and sou-
venirs, and autographed photographs of UFO researchers and investigative
journalists. According to Boylan, the bar's proprietor, Joe Travis, told him
"of having a UFO come down once at night after closing and illuminate the
entire interior of their restaurant."

Of all that Boylan has said so far, only the Little A "Le" Inn Bar seems
significant to me. Despite the most rigid security procedures on a military
or government installation, one generally has to look only as far as the bar
favored by that installation's personnel to find evidence of what really goes
on behind the installation's closely guarded gates. If the Tonopah Test Range
is engaged only in missile research, then why so much interest in UFOs at
the local pub?

Boylan next describes how he continued twenty-five miles southeast
and, using U.S. Geodetic Survey maps and the directions given in Hamil-
ton's Cosmic Top Secret, took the "turnoff marked by the infamous black
mailbox" and carefully drove west on dirt roads towards the Groom Lake
base. He was at that time still on Bureau of Land Management property,
about five miles from the boundary of the military reservation and, there-
fore, Boylan says, in "a perfectly lawful area to be driving."

"I was heading towards Area 51 and I had USGS topographic maps so
I knew exactly where I was," he continues. "I'd come off Highway 375, dri-
ving down there minding my own business, and came upon this unmarked
Ford Bronco with a light bar on the roof parked just off the roadbed fac-
ing me. In it were two guys with camouflage jumpsuits without insignia on
them. 'Well, it's a free country,' I figured. A couple of bozos can sit out here
in their RV in the desert if they want to.' But as I went by them I noticed
they had weapons. I wasn't totally naive," Boylan tells us. "I expected they
might have been guards, though I wondered why they were so far out. And
there were no markings designating their authority, if they had any. Still, I
figured, 'They're there and I'm here, and I've still got five miles to play with

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CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

before the game gets abrupt.' I mean, I was prepared for there to be a
locked gate and upon my failure to produce adequate ID, I'd be told to
turn around and go back. But that part of the game was not allowed to be
played out.

"Not long after I passed them," Boylan says, "my left rear tire collapsed.
I rolled to a stop, got out, and saw that the tire had a sidewall penetration.
The tread was good; I hadn't driven over anything on the dirt road that
could have caused a sidewall blowout; and I concluded that one of those
two men had shot my tire out."

"They had shotzx. you?" I ask stupidly.

"At my tire," Boylan says. "About a minute later the camouflaged duo
made a U-turn in their Bronco, came up behind me, and one of them got
out and said, 'You having some trouble?' By that time, I had the jack out
and was trying to change the tire for the spare and I said, 'Yes.'

"He said, Were you heading up there?,' nodding towards Area ji, and
I said, 'Yes.'

"So he asked me if I had a security badge. I told him I didn't and he said,
'Well, then it's no use going there. You can't get through up ahead.'
" 'Why?' I said. 'You got a locked gate?'
"And he said, 'Yes.'

" 'Well,' I said, 'I guess I can't do it anyway. I've got to limp back to
town and get a replacement tire. This tire's shot.'

" 'Yeah, it is,' he said. Too bad.' And he just kind of chuckled and got
back into the Bronco and they drove back to their previous position."

"Where were they in relation to your Blazer when your tire went flat?"
I ask.

"I was proceeding due west on the right-hand side of the dirt road. They
were facing east a little off the roadbed on the south side of the road, posi-
tioned as if they were coming from the other direction and parked off-road
a little bit. It happened shortly after I had passed them."

"How hot was it out there?"

"It was late afternoon, warm, but mild. Probably in the mid-eighties."
"And you said your tires were in good shape when you made this trip?"
"Oh, yeah — oh, yeah," Boylan says.

"I've had sidewall blowouts, too, without anyone shooting at me," I say.
"Could your tire have exploded for another reason?"

"I know what you're talking about," Boylan says. "You go over some-
thing in the road and it snaps up and pierces the tire. I never ran over any-
thing."

"But you must have been watching them in your rearview mirror as you
continued past them," I say. "You didn't see them get out of the Bronco?"

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1 7 1

"This happened right after I went past them. I was looking straight
ahead. Frankly, I didn't want them to wave me down, so I was doing the
eyes-straight-ahead maneuver."

"Could there be any explanation other than that they shot your tire?"

"Oh, I looked for other explanations," Boylan tells me, "but, frankly, I
was reluctantly forced to come to that one in the absence of any other. And
what with that clear kind of firm, somewhat menacing attitude those two,
and those other two guards at the Tonopah Test Range, manifested . . ."
Boylan finishes his sentence with a shrug.

"So what did you do?" I ask.

"I retreated," he says with a wry smile. "I waited until it was dark,
and then I returned and prudently parked about a quarter-mile east of
where I had last seen the Bronco and got out my binoculars. I remained
there observing the ridge line of the Groom Range above Areas 51 and
S-4 from about nine to ten-thirty p.m., during which time I saw three
bright round lights come up from below the ridge line, presumably off
the desert floor, or else scooting low from somewhere else, then rising
vertically.

"I spotted the first one around nine-thirty," Boylan continues. "I saw
a bright golden-orange round light rise up vertically from behind the
Groom Range. The altitude of the range at that point is probably about
twelve hundred feet or so. They're not very tall mountains. So this one
cleared the mountains by about five hundred feet then leveled off and
seemed to hover for several minutes, then drifted slowly south about a
thousand feet. It gave off a very intense red-orange light, a very bright
glowing that looked more like ionizing effects rather than any light on
board shining out. It was like the craft's whole frame was just ionizing off
an extremely intense light — in other words, the frame was the light-
emitting body, not a light from on board. And then it descended slowly,
vertically, behind the mountains.

"The object had the same color and shape and was viewed from the
same direction as the object photographed by Gary Schulz, who had en-
larged and computer-enhanced his photograph to reveal a flying disc with
a cupola on top surrounded by an ionization haze of light. Schulz called it
an HP AC — a 'human-powered alien craft,' " Boylan explains.

"Soon, a second brilliantly shining round object rose vertically and
hovered about five hundred feet above the ridge line. This object was strob-
ing and emitting a brilliant blue-white light, apparently from the skin of
the craft. It then began a series of incredible, blindingly fast pendulum and
zigzag and back-and-forth maneuvers at mere fraction-of-a-second inter-
vals, covering, perhaps, nine hundred feet in a jump! It just astonished me

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CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

that something could jump around so fast through all those turns and
acute angles.

"After this dazzling aerobatics performance, it settled down to hover-
ing for a while, then resumed to gyrations again. Both super-quick ma-
neuvering episodes lasted over a minute each. Finally the object again
hovered motionless, then began flying south, downrange, at a constant al-
titude and direction at about 80 mph. I tracked it through my binoculars
for about thirty miles before it became indistinguishable from the star
field.

"About a half hour after it had disappeared," Boylan continues, "a third
brilliant round object, glowing with the same intense red-orange-gold color,
rose above the Groom Range, hovered, drifted slowly, then began strobing.
Next it began gliding downrange again at a constant altitude and at about
80 mph, but with somewhat irregularly spaced erratic jumps forward." Boy-
lan pauses for a moment, then adds, "Another odd thing was that the ap-
pearance of this craft alternated between strobes: on one phase it was a
bright, sharply defined orb of orange-gold light; on the alternate phase it
was a smudgy golden sphere of light."

I ask Boylan: If these had been conventional machines like helicopters,
would he have heard their engines?

"Oh, I think so. It was quiet enough. You could hear anything. For ex-
ample, at one point in the evening while I was staked out, some little bi-
plane went over way far away. You could hear it drone for what seemed like
twenty minutes. As soon as it cleared the horizon, you could hear it all the
way to the next horizon."

"And the flying objects you saw made no noise?"

"None," he says. 'And the angles they did it at! There's no jet or heli-
copter or anything that could move that fast at those angles, correct itself,
and go again in thirds of seconds. It would have just been torn apart! You
couldn't have steered that fast. There was a bit of remote jumping where you
didn't see the body of the craft in the meanwhile. I mean, it was here and it
was there. It was most extraordinary!"

"You said earlier you believe these discs are our own — how did you put
it? — 'primitive Piper Cubs'? What makes you think that?"

"Well, these craft were navigated in a rather conservative and slow
fashion and did not display the confident maneuvering and extremely
rapid departure style so often reported for extraterrestrial UFOs. And so I
concluded that these are either U.S. -manufactured discs at a primitive
stage of technology, or at a primitive stage of pilot mastery. However, the
extreme hyper-fast aerobatics-in-place performed by the second object in-

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173

dicates to me, at least, that inertial forces, and therefore gravity, have been
overcome by these craft."

Boylan goes on and on. At Archulete Peak, just north of Dulce, New
Mexico, "reported in Howard Blum's Out There as an underground base,"* he
says, he "drove around the mesa and discovered a mysterious 'ranch' " that
was supposedly a "beefalo-raising outfit. However," Boylan continues, "in
the front yard of the ranch between the road and the two ranch buildings
were four odd twenty-five-foot-high guard towers on stilts." He has a
photograph of them. He concludes that "there appears more there than
meets the eye."

From Archulete Peak Boylan proceeded to the huge Los Alamos Na-
tional Laboratories, where, he tells us, "theoretical research having
weapons applications is conducted for the Department of Energy by the
University of California." He took photographs of the entrance gate, No
Trespassing and radiation warning signs, and the laboratory's building
T-io, containing the Center for Human Genome Studies as well as the
HIV (AIDS) Database.

"Rather strange enterprises for a military weapons-oriented research
complex to be involved in, rather than the National Institute of Health,"
Boylan comments. "One cannot help being reminded of the rumors that
AIDS is a biological weapon gone amok. Even more curious is another
building which houses the laboratories theoretical biology and biophysics
studies."

* Howard Blum, a prize- winning former New York Times journalist, reported only that
in 1981, a Dr. Paul Bennewitz, "an accomplished physicist . . . with a soft spot for UFOs,"
had become convinced that "two opposing forces of aliens had invaded the United States.
The white aliens wanted intergalactic brotherhood; they came to this planet in peace. How-
ever, the malevolent group, the grays, were in control."

According to Bennewitz, Blum writes, "it was the grays who were responsible for the
cattle mutilations, the human abductions, and the implanting of mind-control devices in
humans. The government was not only aware ofthis,buthad also negotiated a secret treaty
with these invaders. The grays were granted the right to establish an underground base be-
neath Archulete Peak . . . and in return the military had received a shipment of extraterres-
trial weapons. But then an atomic-powered spaceship crashed on Archulete Peak. The grays
suspected sabotage. And, Bennewitz was convinced after decoding radio transmissions, the
treaty was about to be broken. The angry grays were preparing for nothing short of total
war."

Despite the fact that the government had been running a disinformation campaign
against Bennewitz to "systematically confuse, discourage, and discredit" him, Blum does
not suggest that there was any truth to Bennewitz's charges. 14

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CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

Boylan slides across a photo of that building and amends his last state-
ment, saying it may be "less curious if the rumor is true that the extrater-
restrial corpses from the crashed UFO near Corona, New Mexico, were
brought to Los Alamos for study."*

"Besides nukes and exotic biology," Boylan is saying, "the Los Alamos
National Laboratories also researches military applications of intense mag-
netic fields at its National High Magnet Field Laboratory — a prerequisite to
gravity/antigravity research. The theoretical weapons physics of Los Alamos
is translated into actual working models of high-tech weapons at Sandia Na-
tional Laboratories in Albuquerque. ..."

Boylan then visited Kirtland Air Force Base southeast of Albuquerque,
where he spotted the Southwest Regional Office of the DOE (he shows us
a photo), the Sandia National Laboratories (photo), the Interservice Nu-

* The story of crashed flying saucers and alien bodies recovered by the military in se-
cret is another one of those UFO conspiracy stories that will not go away. Skeptics dismiss
such accounts out of hand for lack of hard evidence; but in two specific instances — the al-
leged crash at Roswell, New Mexico, on the night of July 2, 1947, and the alleged crash at
Corona, New Mexico, six days later — there is some compelling anecdotal evidence. Indis-
putably, in the Roswell case, anomalous wreckage was found by William Brazel dispersed
over a crash site three-quarters of a mile long by several hundred feet wide on an isolated
ranch he managed about seventy-five miles north of Roswell. The military quickly investi-
gated the crash, cordoned off the site, swept the ground clear of any peculiar debris, and
loaded it aboard a B-29, which was ordered to transport it to Wright-Patterson Air Force
Base (then Wright Field) near Dayton, Ohio, for examination. An initial press statement,
authorized by the Roswell Field commander, Colonel William Blanchard, was released, an-
nouncing that the wreckage of a flying disc had been recovered. According to the account
Timothy Good published in Above Top Secret:

On arrival at an intermediate stop at Carswell Army Air Forces Base, Fort Worth,
Texas (headquarters of the 8th Air Force) General Roger Ramey took charge and
ordered [509th Bomb Group Staff intelligence officer Major Jesse] Marcel and
others on the plane not to talk to reporters. A second press statement was issued
which stated that the wreckage was nothing more than the remains of a weather
balloon and its attached tinfoil radar target, and this was prominently displayed
at the press conference. Meanwhile, the real [Good's italics] wreckage arrived at
Wright Field under armed guard; Marcel returned to Roswell, and Brazel was held
incommunicado for nearly a week while the crash site was stripped of every scrap
of debris.

A news leak via press wire from Albuquerque describing this fantastic story
was interrupted and the radio station in question, and another, were warned not
to continue the broadcast: "ATTENTION ALBUQUERQUE: CEASE TRANS-
MISSION. REPEAT. CEASE TRANSMISSION. NATIONAL SECURITY
ITEM. DO NOT TRANSMIT. STAND BY . . ."' 5

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clear Weapons School (photo), and the Department of Energy's National
Atomic Museum (photo).

At the National Atomic Museum Boylan learned that the United
States "now has hydrogen bombs downsized as small as a RV propane tank"
and that for five years the United States has been "producing controlled,
self-sustaining nuclear fusion, contained by a strong magnetic field," he
says. "They use lasers to implode fissionable material and produce fusion.
This is an inexhaustible and rather compact energy source," he explains,
"and may be the power plant for the gravity-defying craft I saw at Area 51."

It was at the National Atomic Museum that Boylan learned that
Sandia National Laboratories had, he said, achieved "advanced particle
acceleration capabilities that can deliver a one-hundred-trillion-volt
burst of ions using a lithium diode one inch thick." Sandia National
Laboratories and its test ranges, he tells us, extend south and east of the
DOE headquarters for over a hundred square miles and take up most of
Kirtland Air Force Base. "Activities identified by sign," he reports, "in-
clude mostly weapons application research in nuclear, magnetic, solar,
electromagnetic pulse, laser and particle beam energy. But the piece de re-
sistance of Star Wars weapons research applications I found was 'Project
ARIES, the Advanced Research Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) Simulator
Site,' where a two-block-long device was built for the Defense Nuclear
Agency by EG&G. Does that name mean anything to you?"

"EG&G? No," I say.

"It stands for Edgerton, Germhausen & Greer, a shadowy corporation
involved — along with Wackenhut Corporation — in security for Areas 51
and S-4, Black Budget weapons operations like Project Aries, and in main-
taining various nuclear facilities for the U.S. government. The electromag-
netic pulse weapon consists of a block-and-a-half-long barrel horizontally
supported on a nonconductive wooden trestle twenty-five feet high con-
nected to a two-story tower which is connected, in turn, to an immense
electrical apparatus with huge arms and massive connecting cables, looking
like a gigantic Van de Graaff generator. The long-rumored electromagnetic
pulse generator at last!"

There is no photo.

Boylan suggests that the 100-trillion-volt electromagnetic bursts were
designed to overpower extraterrestrial UFOs, since such a device is clearly
"overkill for a mere incoming ballistic missile."

Trying to find the proper road back from the solar weapons lab, Boylan
tells us, he came upon "the famous Manzano Mountain Weapons Storage
facility, an entire mountain tunneled into for storage of various high-

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security items such as nuclear weapons and, according to Timothy Good in
Above Top Secret, retrieved UFOs."*

Boylan was impressed by Manzano's security. The entire complex, he
tells us, "is surrounded by three separate high, razor-wire-tipped fences
with bare-earth zones between, presumably with motion sensors embed-
ded. Armed personnel in jeeps constantly patrol the area. At the northern
end of Manzano is the notorious Coyote Canyon Test Site, where ex-
tremely classified Air Force, DOE, and Sandia National Laboratories re-
search takes place. This is the area where USAF personnel spotted a UFO
hovering low in 1979. nt

"Peering partway into Coyote Canyon by binoculars," Boylan's dinner-
table account of his tour continues, "I could see a strange metallic ball
twenty feet high resting on the ground, sheltered by a flat tin roof above,
supported by four poles surrounding the huge sphere. Its purpose is un-

* Good himself does not allege that retrieved UFOs are stored at Manzano. He merely
quotes a late-1980 letter to the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization (APRO) from an
unnamed airman stationed at Kirtland, who wrote in part: "I have heard rumors, but seri-
ous rumors, that the USAF has a crashed UFO stored in the Manzano Storage
area. . . . This area is heavily guarded by USAF Security. I have spoken with two employees
of Sandia Laboratories, who also store classified objects in Manzano, and they told me San-
dia has examined several UFOs during the last 20 years. Parts of one that crashed near
Roswell, N.M .... was examined by Sandia scientists. That is still being stored in Man-
zano." The letter writer explained that he had to remain anonymous because he was "a ca-
reer airman with time remaining on active duty. I feel I would be threatened if I disclosed
my name."' 6

' Actually, the sighting Boylan is referring to is one of a series that took place between
August 8 and 22, 1980, according to Air Force Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI)
complaint forms obtained through the Freedom of Information Act and paraphrased for
Timothy Good by Major Ernest J. Edwards:

"August 8, three Security Policemen ... on duty inside Manzano Weapons Stor-
age Area sighted an unidentified light in the air that traveled from North to South
over the Coyote Canyon area of the Department of Def ense Restricted Test
Range ..." Interviewed by AFOSI investigators separately, the three Security Po-
licemen independently confirmed that at approximately 11:30 p.m. they had ob-
served that "a very bright light traveled with great speed and stopped suddenly in
the sky over Coyote Canyon. The three first thought the object was a helicopter,
however, after observing the strange aerial maneuvers (stop and go), they felt a he-
licopter couldn't have performed such skills. The light landed in the Coyote
Canyon area. Sometime later, [the] three witnessed the light take off and leave
proceeding straight up at a high speed and disappear . . ."

The following night, according to this same AFOSI complaint form, a San-
dia Security Guard reported that twenty minutes past midnight, "he was driving
East on the Coyote Canyon access road on a routine building check of an alarmed
structure. As he approached the structure he observed a bright light near the

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known." But then he goes on to say that "whatever the research at Coyote
Canyon is, it has made the water in the area unfit to drink or even wash your
hands in," and shows a photograph of a sign warning about the water.

From Coyote Canyon, Boylan proceeded south toward Alamogordo to
the National Solar Observatory at Sunspot. The observatory, atop 9,200-foot-
high Sacramento Peak, is used to monitor the effects of solar electromagnetic
radiation and geophysical and geomagnetic disturbances, Boylan explains, on
the operation of spacecraft and satellite stability. Boylan notes that beneath
the entrance sign for the observatory is "an additional small sign which reads
'Umbra — the National Security Agency's highest security classification.

"A thousand feet east of the NSO," Boylan continues, "is the Army
Sacramento Peak Frequency Surveillance Station with its several signs for-
bidding entrance and warnings of severe penalties. This station monitors
electromagnetic communications and telemetry on and over White Sands
Missile Range, Holloman Air Force Base, and NASA's secret Johnson Space
City complex. My remote viewer consultant noted underground facilities at
the surveillance station and EM force generation, which may explain why
there were no cricket or forest sounds near this electromagnetic intelligence
facility. It's probably operated by the National Security A — "

"Dr. Boylan, I beg your pardon," I interrupt, "but who did you say
noted these underground facilities?"

"My remote viewer consultant, Nancy Matz. She's a woman I consult
with back in Sacramento. She also told me she had spotted several levels of
excavated chambers in Archulete Mesa, but that there had been a great dis-
turbance inside the mountain which caused some of the chambers to cave
in on others."

"She was with you?"

"No, no. I consulted with herbackin Sacramento. She's a remote viewer.
a person who happens to have the psychic gift for remote viewing. In other
words, she can in her mind go with you to places you've been and see things
you've seen and some things you may have trouble remembering."

ground behind the structure. He also observed an object he first thought was a he-
licopter. But after driving closer, he observed a round disc-shaped object. He at-
tempted to radio for a backup patrol but his radio would not work. As he
approached the object on foot armed with a shotgun, the object took off in a ver-
tical direction at a high rate of speed . . ."

And again, on August 22nd, three other security policemen saw "the same
aerial phenomenon" as had been described by the previous witnesses: "Again the
object landed in Coyote Canyon." The report continues: ". . . another Security
Guard observed an object land near an alarmed structure during the first week of
August, but did not report it until just recently for fear of harassment." 17

178

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

"How does she do this?" I ask.

"Did you meet Stubblebine's protdge\ the 'spook' — Dr. John what's-
his-face — academic degree . . . John Alexander from PsyCorp at the con-
ference?"

"I don't think so," I say.

"PsyCorp is a civilian version of the Army military intelligence psy-
chological warfare section. Stubblebine, Alexander's boss, was reasonably
forthcoming about what they were doing when they were in military in-
telligence. Blum's book [Out There] talks a bit about this, too, how they
have guys who can sit in the Pentagon and through remote viewing spot a
Soviet submarine submerged beneath the Atlantic and give you its correct
longitude and latitude. Well, Stubblebine and Alexander have taken this
little dog-and-pony show civilian-side, developed their own stable of re-
mote viewers, and I can pretty much guarantee you that their main cus-
tomer is still the Central Intelligence Agency. Anyway, my person is not of
their stable, but just happens through the grace of whatever higher powers
to have the gift independently. And when I ran my grand tour of the
Southwest bases, she kind of had the ability to see what I saw and to pick
up some additional details — some of which I have had interestingly cor-
roborated, either by me or by others. So that's what I'm talking about here
when I say she got a couple of these details, such as the excavated cham-
bers, through remote viewing."

"Remote viewing," I say with a straight face.

Boylan explains that because of the tight security at Holloman Air Base,
the White Sands Missile, Range, and NASA's Johnson Space City, he was
unable to "reconnoiter" them, so he proceeded to the National Radio As-
tronomy Observatory (NRAO) with its twenty-seven Very Large Array dish
antennae arranged in a two-mile-long, one-mile-wide inverted T with all
those dishes pointing at a low angle above the horizon due north.

"The stated purpose of this facility," Boylan tells us, "is to collect weak
radio waves from celestial sources. In other words, they are supposedly only
mapping the heavens by locating stars and energized gas fields in space
which emit electromagnetic radiation in the radio frequency. However, as
with other sites on this tour, the National Radio Astronomy Observatory is
not your average boring observatory. Parked adjacent to the headquarters
was an Army truck with NROA insignia, and two — two! — ambulances with
NROA insignia, which leads me to deduce that the handful of astronomers
working there must have a terrible occupational accident record!

"As you know," Boylan continues, "the United States will announce on
October twelfth to coincide with the five hundredth birthday of Colum-
bus's discovery of the New World, that it is turning on its radio telescopes

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179

to listen for intelligent transmissions from space. One could speculate that
the purpose of this upcoming high-profile government announcement is to
create the 'fig leaf for 'uncovering' ET communications and the eventual
open admission by the government of extraterrestrial-government contact.

"What is not speculation," Boylan says firmly, "is the evidence, includ-
ing physical evidence that the government's NROA dishes are also being
used to transmit superpowerful signals into space! Specifically, towards the
direction just above the low north horizon. One clue came when I was hav-
ing dinner at a restaurant near there next to four astronomers from NROA.
One was complaining about trying to get time on a radio dish to do his re-
search. But while I was at the observatory, all twenty-seven dishes were
pointed away from the main part of the sky towards a low target or what-
ever to the north. Furthermore, a photograph of these dishes at the obser-
vatory headquarters again shows all the dishes pointed at the same low
north angle. Why this persistent focus on one area of the sky when there is
such competition for time on the dishes?

"Another clue is the location of the NROA on the plains of San Au-
gustin," Boylan is saying, "a desolate, silent region deliberately chosen for
its remoteness from cities with their radio stations and EM radiation. But it
was not until I left the NROA that I obtained physical evidence. As I was
about two miles out from the Very Large Array, with both my FM and CB
radios on, both radios were simultaneously blanketed by the most intense
screeching and howling I have ever heard! This excruciating noise contin-
ued for several minutes. I could not believe my ears. How could NROA per-
mit such powerful electromagnetic signals to interfere with their listening
to delicate radio signals from space? Finally I was forced to turn off my ra-
dios and did not turn them on again until I reached Pie Town, twenty-one
miles to the northwest. When I turned both radios back on, I could still
hear that deafening screech. It lasted another two minutes, then mercifully
stopped. Afterwards both my FM radio and CB radio were functioning per-
fectly, and I never heard that noise again.

"Now as a result of what I heard! deduced that the NROA was not only
receiving signals from space, but sendingthcni And given the rule that elec-
tromagnetic field strength diminishes algebraically with distance, the ca-
pacity to swamp both the CB and FM radios' frequencies at twenty-one
miles indicated to me that the sending power from the NROA dishes is ex-
traordinary, as would befit a signal intended to penetrate into space. My
question is, whom is the government signaling? And why are they lying
about the purpose of SETI?"

At Pie Town, Boylan explains, he went to check out the Very Large
Baseline Array which is under construction. This huge radiotelescope com-

180 CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

plex is supposed to connect with radiotelescopes already in existence in
Puerto Rico, West Virginia, and Hawaii to create an "antenna" with a "dish
size" the equivalent of one-eighth of the globe, but the only construction he
saw was large ten-foot-diameter pipes, the purpose of which he could not
determine. "What's really going on at Pie Town," he tells us, "I cannot say.
So I headed west to my final destination in California's Black Budget
Palmdale-Lancaster region."

There, sixty miles north of Los Angeles, in theTehachapi Mountains
east of Edwards Air Force Base, Boylan came upon the Tejon Ranch, where
the Northrop Aircraft Corporation, he says, "has its secret saucers works, ac-
cording to researcher William Hamilton III in his book Cosmic Top Secret.
Following Bill's directions, I proceeded seven miles west from Lancaster on
Highway 138 to Road 190, then three miles north to the Kern County line.
Bill was right. Staked out with binoculars between three and five a.m. on
April fifteenth, I saw the same intensely burning bright-orange-gold craft
being test-flown there that I had seen above Areas 51 and S-4. As I watched,
four ultrabright orange-gold orbs rose and traversed a brief one-and-a-half-
mile test loop. At intervals of about a half-hour, each orb took off and plied
its course. The first three took off from what appeared to be the southwest
hangar area of the Northrop complex. The fourth took off from the north-
east staging area. On the ground, each craft was not glowing at first, but ap-
peared in the full moonlight like a parked airliner frame with backlit
porthole windows. I estimate that the width of the craft was about fifty feet.

"As each began to rise," Boylan continues, "it began glowing intensely
all over its frame, as though the frame itself — or perhaps an ionizing field
around the frame — were emitting light. The intensity of this light increased
proportionally to the power demand required to rise vertically above the
ground to an altitude of about two hundred feet over the Northrop plant.
At this altitude, and at maximum brightness, the craft hovered, then slowly
began to glide at about 15 mph in a southwest direction for a mile and a half,
stopped, then swung around, revealing its round bottom side, which emit-
ted an even more intense light. Each craft would then cross back to the stag-
ing area, hover, then descend vertically to the ground. Once on the ground,
each stopped emitting the bright light except for the dim, backlit portholes.

"The fourth craft," Boylan says, "made its loop in a northeasterly di-
rection. Each of these flights appeared to be very brief and cautious 'test
runs' to make sure that the craft actually flew bef ore shipping them off to
Area S-4 for full field testing prior to joining the growing fleet of U.S.
saucers."

"So what do you make of all this?" I ask. "I mean, at your most para-
noid moments what does what you saw mean?"

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1 8 1

"I'm not so sure I'm the one who's paranoid," he said.
"Who is?"

"The government, or why else would our Strategic Defense Initiative
funding have increased by 33 percent in each of the last three years while
there has been a dramatic drop in the Soviet missile threat as the USSR has
fallen apart? Are you familiar with Leonard Stringfield's comment that Star
Wars, ostensibly conceived as a defensive system against Russian missile at-
tacks, may have had from its beginning a defensive UFO connection? The
Union of Concerned Scientists has insisted that there is no rationale for a
SDI system as large as what has been proposed by either Congress or the
Bush administration. This suggests to me that SDI has a different agenda
than stopping Russian missiles, and that agenda is, I believe, a weapons
countermeasures capability against extraterrestrials and their UFOs."

"What sort of 'countermeasures' are you talking about?" I ask.

"Countermeasures like those I saw on my six-state grand tour," Boylan
replies. "Nuclear, laser, electromagnetic pulse, and particle beam weapons.
Look, NASA itself inadvertently provided documentary evidence of this
when the astronauts aboard the Discovery space shuttle transmitted a live
video feed to earth of footage of a UFO crossing just above the Earth's at-
mosphere. On this tape you see a UFO sailing along a straight line, and
then, suddenly, it makes a ninety-degree turn to the right and accelerates off
into deeper space just as a shaped-pulse high-energy beam streaks up from
Earth to exactly the spot where the UFO would have been had it not, a mil-
lisecond before, radically altered its course. This videotape was shown on
NBC's Hard Copy program on June 5, 1992. Get a copy of it and see for
yourself!"

"But if it's a video of what you say it is, why did it never make the
evening news?"

"Because, of course, NASA says what one sees on the film as a UFO is
nothing more than a piece of ice or water. That it isn't a UFO at all."
"So who does say it's a UFO?"

''Well, when it was shown on Hard Copy, UFO Magazine's contributing
editor Don Ecker said it looked to him like a Star Wars weapon shooting at
a UFO above earth's atmosphere. And, from my research, it looks that way
to me. This assembling of a fleet of U.S. saucers in Nevada appears to me to
be part of a related effort to develop our capacity to wage combat with ex-
traterrestrial UFOs on technologically similar terms. So my question is this:
Is the U.S. government's aggressive and — to use your word — paranoid Star
Wars Initiative response the one we want made in our name to visits by in-
telligent life from other planets? Is this the way we want eighty billion of our
tax dollars used? Eighty billion, incidentally, is SDI budget for 1993 to 2005.

182

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

As Edmund Burke once stated, all that is necessary for evil to prevail is for
enough good men and women to do nothing."
"What do you suggest we do?" I ask.

"Demand of our elected representatives that the so-called Black Budget
be opened to full congressional and public scrutiny and debate. This means
all the intelligence budgets, particularly the National Security Agency, the
Central Intelligence Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency. And finally,
we need to demand that Congress pass legislation outlawing and invalidat-
ing the practice of secret Executive Orders by the President with no ac-
countability, such as Truman's classified Executive Order of September 24,
1947, establishing MJ-12 and hiding extraterrestrial contact from the Amer-
ican people."

Time out.

The story behind the MJ-12 documents is a curious one. A little after noon
on December n, 1984, Jaime Shandera, a forty-five-year-old Los Angeles
film producer with a background in documentaries for Time-Life and RKO
General and only a limited interest in UFOs, was sitting alone in his home
killing time prior to a lunch meeting when he heard his screen door open
and the sound of an object being forced through the mail slot in his front
door. When he got up to investigate, he discovered a bulky 8X-by-n-inch
brown envelope sealed with tape lying on his floor. Shandera's name and ad-
dress were neatly typed on a label affixed to the envelope; there was no re-
turn address. When Shandera opened the large envelope he discovered there
was a smaller brown envelope, also sealed with tape, within it; and within
the brown envelope, a white one. Within the white envelope was a canister
containing a roll of exposed but undeveloped Tri-X 35 mm film. Shandera
replaced the film in its canister, the canister in the largest of the envelopes,
and hurried off to his lunch date. Coinciden tally, the person he was meet-
ing was Bill Moore, the writer who, four years earlier, had co-authored with
Charles Berlitz (author of the 1974 best-seller The Bermuda Triangle) The
Roswell Incident, an investigation into the alleged 1947 New Mexico saucer
crash. According to Berlitz and Moore, the bodies of aliens were found in
the wreckage — a momentous discovery that had almost immediately been
concealed by the government of the United States.

Moore was waiting at the restaurant when Shandera arrived. Moore and
Shandera's connection was that they had met to discuss the possibility of to-
gether making a fictional film based on UFO investigator and nuclear
physicist Stanton Friedman's continuing research into the Roswell crash. Al-
though the film never got beyond the discussion stage, Moore and Shandera

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183

remained friends. Furthermore, in the course of that friendship, Shandera
had apparently been drawn into Moore's small coterie of believers in a gov-
ernment cover-up conspiracy. At the restaurant, Shandera told Moore of the
mysterious roll of film, and, not bothering with lunch, the two men excit-
edly rushed out of the restaurant to Moore's house to inspect it. Although
neither Moore nor Shandera had much darkroom experience, they man-
aged to print up some contact sheets and hang them from one of Moore's
living-room curtains to dry.

The contact sheets revealed seven pages of a typewritten document. The
first words Moore was able to make out were those rubber-stamped at the
top of each of the pages: "TOP SECRET / MAJIC / EYES ONLY."

Moore, unwilling to relinquish the glass for an instant to Shandera, ex-
citedly raced through the cover page identifying the material as a briefing
document on "Operation Majestic-12" prepared for President-elect Dwight
D. Eisenhower, to be delivered on November 18, 1952. There followed the
warning that the document contained "information essential to the na-
tional security of the United States;" and that "EYES ONLY access" was
"strictly limited to those possessing Majestic-12 clearance level." The second
page contained the list of members of the Majestic-12 committee. But it was
the third page that Moore found the most stunning.

Following a brief review of Kenneth Arnold's famous "flying saucers"
sighting, and the note in passing that of the hundreds of subsequent sight-
ings that had been reported, many were by "highly credible military and
civilian sources," and that "there were several unsuccessful attempts to uti-
lize aircraft in efforts to pursue reported discs in flight," the third page went
on to state:

In spite of these efforts, little of substance was learned about the objects
until a local rancher reported that one had crashed in a remote region of
New Mexico located approximately seventy-five miles northwest of
Roswell Army Air Base (now Walker Field).

On 07 July, 1947, a secret operation was begun to assure recovery of
the wreckage of this object for scientific study. During the course of this
operation, aerial reconnaissance discovered that four small human-like be-
ings had apparently ejected from the craft at some point before it ex-
ploded. These had fallen to earth about two miles east of the wreckage
site. All four were dead and badly decomposed due to action by predators
and exposure to the elements during the approximately one week time pe-
riod which had elapsed before their discovery. A special scientific team
took charge of removing these bodies for study. (See Attachment "C".)
The wreckage of the craft was also removed to several different locations.
(See Attachment "B".) Civilian and military witnesses in the areawerede-

1 84

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

briefed and news reporters were given the effective cover story that the ob-
ject had been a misguided weather balloon. 18

Here, to Moore's astonishment, was a purported top-secret government
document reporting that the remains of four alien creatures had been found
and recovered two miles east of the wreckage of a crashed flying saucer! 'Not
surprisingly, Moore's reaction to the documents was to ask himself, "Are
these for real?" 19 It is the same question that has haunted everyone who has
studied these documents since.

The validity of the MJ-12 documents, like the validity of the crashed
saucer reports, is one of those pernicious questions that cannot be satisfac-
torily answered without hard evidence. However, because these documents
provide the backbone for the credibility of many of the government cover-
up conspiracy charges, they are worth looking into.

The documents, allegedly prepared for a briefing to be given President-
elect Eisenhower by former CIA director Roscoe Hillenkoetter, identify
Majestic-12 as a "TOP SECRET Research and Development/Intelligence
operation responsible directly and only to the President of the United
States." (Majestic-12 is also variously referred to in UFO literature as Majic-
12, Majority-12, Majesty, MAJI [Majestic, or Majority, Agency for Joint In-
telligence], MAJIC [a security classification meaning MAJI-Controlled],
and the Country Club. 20 )

"Operations of the project," the briefing papers state, "are carried out
under control of the Majestic-12 (Majic-12) Group which was established by
special, classified executive order of President Truman on 24 September 1947,"
a date that would place it two months after the alleged Roswell saucer crash:

upon recommendation by Dr. Vannevar Bush and Secretary James Forres-
tal. (See Attachment 'A.') Members of the Majestic-12 Group were desig-
nated as follows:

Adm. Roscoe H. Hillenkoetter

Dr. Vannevar Bush

Secy. James V. Forrestal

Gen. Nathan F. Twining

Gen. Hoyt B. Vandenberg

Dr. Detlev Bronk

Dr. Jerome Hunsaker

Mr. Sidney W. Souers

Mr. Gordon Gray

Dr. Donald Menzel

Gen. Robert M. Montague

Dr. Lloyd V. Berkner

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The death of Secretary Forrestal on 22 May, 1949, created a vacancy
which remained unfilled until 01 August, 1950, upon which date Gen.
Walter B. Smith was designated as permanent replacement. 21

Who were these men, and why might they have been chosen for this
group?

Heading the list is Admiral Roscoe H. Hillenkoetter. In 1947 Rear Admi-
ral Hillenkoetter was Truman's first director of the Central Intelligence
Agency, which, most likely only coinciden tally, had been newly created the
same month as Majestic-12. In 1956, four years after this document was al-
legedly written, the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenom-
ena (NICAP) was founded by former Navy physicist Thomas Townsend
Brown. Hillenkoetter joined NICAP's board of directors following his re-
tirement from the Navy in June 1957. During his tenure as a director,
Timothy Good reports, Hillenkoetter "made a number of extraordinary
statements attesting to the reality and seriousness of the UFO phenomenon.
He was convinced that UFOs were unknown objects operating under intel-
ligent control and that 'the Air Force is still censoring UFO sightings. Hun-
dreds of authentic reports written by veteran pilots and other technically
trained observers have been ridiculed or explained away as mistakes, delu-
sions or hoaxes. ... It is imperative that we learn where UFOs come from
and what their purpose is. The public has a right to know.' " 22 Hillenkoetter
would have been a natural choice to sit on a secret government panel inves-
tigating UFOs. But, of course, as the former senior avionics editor of Avia-
tion Week & Space Technology and this country's now-leading UFO debunker,
Philip Klass, has noted, a clever hoaxer would have known this.

Dr. Vannevar Bush, Truman's highly respected scientific advisor through
World War II and the 1940s, would also have been a natural. In 1941 Dr.
Bush had organized the National Defense Resources Council and, in 1943,
the Office of Scientific Research and Development, which played a major
role in creating the Manhattan Project, which led to the first atomic bomb.
But in 1948 Dr. Bush had written Truman that it was his wish "ultimately
to be free of governmental duties in order to return more completely to sci-
entific matters," and to that end had already resigned from the Defense Re-
search and Development Board, another government organization. Klass,
aware of this correspondence, asks why Bush would then have remained
four more years on Majic-12. The most reasonable response to that, I think,
would be to ask in return: If Bush had any scientific curiosity whatsoever,
how could he not have remained on Majic-12?

Timothy Good quotes a top-secret memorandum written by a "highly
respected scientist," Wilbert B. Smith, a senior radio engineer with the

186

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

Canadian government Department of Transportation, to the Controller of
Telecommunications, recommending that a Canadian research project be
set up to study UFOs. In this memo, dated November 21, 1950, Smith
wrote: "We believe we are on the track of something which may well prove
to be the introduction to a new technology. The existence of a different
technology is borne out by investigations which are being carried on at the
present time in relation to flying saucers." 23

Smith further reported that through discreet inquiries made at the
Canadian embassy in Washington, he had learned:

a. The matter is the most highly classified subject in the United States
government, rating higher even than the H-bomb.

b. Flying saucers exist.

c. Their modus operandi is unknown but concentrated effort is being
made by a small group headed by Doctor Vannevar Bush [my italics] .

d. The entire matter is considered by the United States authorities to be
of tremendous significance. 24

Not surprisingly, Good concludes that the "small group" Bush headed
must have been Majestic-12. And because Smith's secret memorandum was
released by the Canadian government, its authenticity, security classifica-
tion, and content, Good suggests, significantly increase the chances that the
Majic-12 document is genuine.

James V. Forrestal, the other individual upon whose recommendation
then-President Harry S Truman had established the Majestic-12 Group, had
served as Truman's under secretary of the navy from 1944 to 1947. In 1947,
two months after the "Roswell crash," the National Security Act was en-
acted and Truman appointed Forrestal to the newly created cabinet position
of secretary of defense, with the task of reorganizing and coordinating all
the armed services.

Among the MJ-12 documents that fell into Moore's hands was the brief
September 27, 1947, top-secret/eyes-only memorandum from President
Truman to Forrestal authorizing the secretary of defense "to proceed with
all due speed and caution" in setting up the Majestic-12 organization. The
memo closes with the President expressing his "feeling that any future con-
siderations relative to the ultimate disposition of this matter should rest
solely with the Office of the President following appropriate discussions
with yourself, Dr. Bush, and the Director of Central Intelligence." 25

Five years later, in November 1952, at the time the Majestic-12 briefing
document was supposedly written, the composition of the Majic-12 Group
remained the same but for the replacement of Forrestal. In March 1949, as

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a result of a serious nervous breakdown, James Forrestal resigned from his
position as secretary of defense. Two months later he committed suicide.
His seat on Majic-12 remained empty until August 1950, when it was taken
by General Walter Bedell Smith, Eisenhower's World War II chief of staff.
Smith, at the time this briefing document was allegedly written, was serv-
ing as director of the CIA.

Fourth man on the list of members was General Nathan F. Twining. Al-
though Twining subsequently became chief of staff of the United States Air
Force in 1953, and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1957, at the time
the Majic-12 Group was allegedly formed he was the commanding general
of the Air Material Command based at Wright Field near Dayton — the field
to which the remains of the crashed Roswell disc were reportedly taken just
two months before Truman's Executive Order creating Majic-12 was signed.

There is also evidence that "due to a very sudden and important matter"
Twining had cancelled an announced trip to the West Coast on July 8, 1947,
the day the first press report of the retrieval of a crashed disc near Roswell was
released by the public information officer at Roswell Field. William Moore,
into whose hands these documents had so suspiciously fallen, was subse-
quently able to learn that although reporters at the time of the saucer crash
were told that Twining, while out of the office, was still "probably in Wash-
ington, D.C.," the general, in fact, had flown to New Mexico, where he re-
mained through July io. 26 Ten weeks later, responding to a request by the chief
of the Air Intelligence Requirements Division at the Pentagon for informa-
tion regarding "flying discs," Twining replied in a secret memorandum:

It is the opinion that:

a. The phenomenon reported is something real and not vision-
ary or fictitious.

b. There are objects probably approximating the shape of a disc,
of such appreciable size as to appear to be as large as man-
made aircraft.

c. There is a possibility that some of the incidents may be caused
by natural phenomena, such as meteors.

d. The reported operating characteristics such as extreme rates
of climb, maneuverability (particularly in roll) and action
which must be considered evasive when sighted or contacted
by friendly aircraft and radar, lend belief to the possibility that
some of the objects are controlled manually, automatically, or
remotely.

e. The apparent common description of the objects is as follows:
1. Metallic or light reflecting surface.

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CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

2. Absence of trail, except in a few instances when the object ap-
parently was operating under high performance conditions.

3. Circular or elliptical in shape, flat on bottom and domed
on top.

4. Several reports of well kept formation flights varying from
three to nine objects.

5. Normally no associated sound, except in three instances a
substantial rumbling roar was noted.

6. Level flight speeds normally above 300 knots are estimated.

Twining then suggests that "due consideration should be given" the possibil-
ity that the objects are our own, "the product of some high security project"
he knew nothing about, or that "some foreign power has a form of propul-
sion, possibly nuclear, which is outside of our domestic knowledge." But
then Twining also suggested that due consideration should be given to the
fact that there was a "lack of physical evidence in the shape of crash recov-
ered exhibits which would undeniably prove the existence of these objects." 27

Skeptics have made much of the fact that Twining here was denying the
existence of any UFO-crash-recovered materials despite, the allegations that
he had flown to New Mexico during the Roswell saucer recovery and was
commanding general at the air base to which the materials were supposedly
taken. But what else could Twining say? Even if he himself had physically
handled wreckage from the Roswell crash, this memo, although written the
day before the Majestic-12 Group was formed, would have to reflect Twin-
ing's knowledge that he was to be a member of this group and was forbid-
den to disclose information about the saucer retrieval to anyone outside of
his fellow Majic-12 members and the President of the United States.

According to Klass, within weeks of the formation of the alleged Ma-
jestic-12 committee, Twining was transferred to head the Alaskan Com-
mand, which, if the remains of a crashed disc were being examined at his
former headquarters, didn't seem to make sense. Why didn't Twining re-
main in charge of the investigation? And why wasn't his successor at Wright
Field appointed to take Twining's place?

Before moving on, it is important to note that a significant aspect of
Twining's memo was the recommendation that "Headquarters, Army Air
Forces issue a directive assigning a priority, security classification, and Code
Name for a detailed study of this [flying saucer] matter. . . ." 28 That study,
undertaken two months later, in December 1947, led to the establishment
of Project Sign, forerunner of Projects Grudge and Blue Book, the United
States Air Force investigation into the UFO phenomenon for which J. Allen
Hynek served as scientific consultant.

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Fifth man was General HoytS. Vandenberg, Air Force chief of staff at the
creation of Majic-12. Vandenberg had been the second director of the Cen-
tral Intelligence Group from June 1946 through May 1947 prior to the cre-
ation of the Central Intelligence Agency. An Air Force chief with an
intelligence background would be another natural choice for Majic-12.
Klass argues that if General Vandenberg knew UFOs were real and a threat
at the time of the outbreak of sightings over the nation's capital in the sum-
mer of 1952, why had the Air Force and he not taken the mysterious radar
and visual sightings more seriously instead of dismissing them as "tempera-
ture inversion"? But what could the Air Force do against objects capable of
outrunning, outclimbing, and outmaneuvering them but deny they exist?
Admission of such vulnerability had frightening implications for national
security — a conclusion seemingly reinforced by Vandenberg's actions four
years earlier, the year after the alleged Roswell crash. At that time, the Air
Technical Intelligence Center had reported in its classified "Estimate of the
Situation" that they were of the opinion that UFOs were interplanetary.
Vandenberg's response had been to order ATIC's Estimate burned.

Dr. Detlev Bronk, the sixth man on the Majic-12 list, was chairman of
the National Research Council, a member of the Medical Advisory Board
of the Atomic Energy Commission, and, like Vannevar Bush, a scientific ad-
viser to President Truman. Dr. Bronk, an internationally respected physiol-
ogist and biophysicist whose research specialty was the transmission of
nerve impulses to skeletal muscles and fibers and nerve physiology, allegedly
performed the autopsies on the "four small, human-like beings" recovered
from the crashed Roswell silver disc. Dr. Bronk, too, according to skeptic
Philip Klass, would be a hoaxer's safe choice.

Coincidentally, perhaps, Dr. Bronk was a member of the Scientific Advi-
sory Committee to the Brookhaven National Laboratory along with National
Bureau of Standards director Dr. Edward Condon, who subsequently was di-
rector of the USAF-sponsored Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects
committee of a dozen or so scholars commissioned in 1966 to objectively ex-
amine the existing UFO evidence and make a recommendation as to whether
further investigation was deemed necessary. The "Condon Report," as the
final study became known when it was released in 1968, left practically every-
one dissatisfied. The response of the M.I.T. conference's David M Jacobs to
the Condon Report is typical among ufologists: "Condon's flip attitude, his
controversial managerial style, and internal disagreements over procedures
and evidence," he wrote in Secret Life, "severely hampered the committee's in-
vestigation. In spite of the committee's serious split, Condon recommended
in the 1968 final report that the Air Force give up UFO investigations because
'further extensive study of UFOs probably cannot be justified in the expecta-

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CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

tion that science will be advanced,' and UFOs do not 'pose a defense prob-
lem.' For Condon, the entire UFO affair was an enormous waste of time filled
with hoaxes, bogus contactees, and weak-thinking UFO enthusiasts awash in
the will to believe.' " 29 Based upon the Condon committee's recommenda-
tions, the Air Force's overt expression of interest in UFOs ended and its posi-
tion continued to be that UFOs were a public fad.

Timothy Good notes that "rumors that the CIA was responsible for the
biased negative conclusions of Dr. Condon have abounded" ever since his
committee's report was made public, and points out, "There can be no
denying the fact that Condon and some key members of his committee de-
liberately set out to convey to the public an image of scientific impartiality,
while systematically debunking the subject." 30

Good also mentions the interesting fact that while the committee was
in the process of making its study, Dr. Condon asked UFO researcher Dr.
James Harder "what he would do if he were responsible for a project report
that might reflect a conclusion that UFOs were a manifestation of extrater-
restrial intelligence." Harder made public his response in a bulletin of the
Aerial Phenomena Research Organization: "I said I thought there would be
other issues than the scientific ones, notably international repercussions and
national security. [Dr. Condon] smiled the smile of a man who sees his own
opinions reflected in the opinions of others and said that he had given the
matter much thought, and had decided that if the answer was to be a posi-
tive finding of ETH [Extraterrestrial Hypothesis], he would not make the
finding public, but would take the report, in his briefcase, to the President's
Science Advisor, and have the decision made in Washington." 31 In other
words, according to Harder, Condon would have taken the report to the
President's science advisor Majic-12 committee member Detlev Bronk and
such a positive finding would have been killed.

The problem I have with Harder's version of his conversation with Dr.
Condon is the problem I have with Harder himself. My impression of
Harder from the M.I.T conference is that he does not make the most reli-
able source: he tends to see conspiracies wherever he looks.* But, in fairness,
if I had been investigating this phenomenon as long as Harder has, I would
probably be borderline paranoid, too.

* The opening day of the conference, when I first met James Harder, he asked me if I
was any relation to Air Force Colonel Joseph Bryan, III. I said, "Yes, he's my father. Why?"
Harder in effect responded that my father had been the CIA plant in NICAP responsible
for that group's disintegration.

Timothy Good, too, goes to some length in Above Top Secret to link my father's
CIA involvement with NICAP's demise. Anyone who knows anything about the history of

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Seventh man on the Majic-12 list is Dr. Jerome Hunsaker, a former head
of the Departments of Aeronautical Engineering and Mechanical Engi-
neering at M.I.T. At the time of the creation of the MAJIC-12 Group, Hun-
saker was chairman of the National Advisory Committee on Aerospace.
Ufologists and skeptics alike are in agreement that Hunsaker's credentials
would make him a logical choice for examining the remains of a crashed fly-
ing saucer.

Sidney W. Souers is eighth. From January through June 1946, he was Tru-
man's first director of the Central Intelligence Group, the CIA's forerunner.
In 1947, at the time when Majestic-12 was established, Souers became exec-
utive secretary of the National Security Council. He retired in 1950 but was
retained as a special consultant to the President on security matters. Klass
finds it suspicious that Souers, two years following his retirement, would
have remained on Majic-12 and asks whether it wouldn't have made more
sense to appoint his replacement at the NSC in his stead. I don't have any
problems with Souers remaining on Majic-12; the fewer people involved in
any so sensitive an investigative group, the more secure the group's findings.

More puzzling is the inclusion of the ninth man, Gordon Gray. At
Majic-i2s formation, Gray was only an assistant secretary of the army; he
did not become the actual secretary of the army until 1949. Klass's inves-
tigation into Gray's background — Gray had been schooled as a lawyer and
had spent the previous decade as a newspaper publisher — provided no
hint, Klass felt, as to why Gray might have been a member of this group.
But Klass apparently did not know that in postwar Washington, Gray's
reputation as a gentleman with intelligence, reliability, and without polit-
ical ties or debts would have made him an attractive addition to any se-
cret, Executive-Ordered intelligence-gathering committee. Furthermore,
his legal and journalistic training would have made Gray a good investi-
gator. In 1950, Gray was appointed special assistant to President Truman
on National Security Affairs, and in 1951, according to UFO investigator
William Steinman, he was directing the Psychological Strategy Board, to
which Majic-12 member and CIA director Walter Bedell Smith referred in
a 1952 CIA memorandum on the psychological warfare implications of
UFOs. 32

NICAP knows that the group didn't need anybody's help in its disintegration; it simply self-
destructed. And in the second place, while I was growing up, my father's unswerving, out-
spoken faith in the existence of UFOs, which he maintained until his death in 1993, was, I
felt, somewhat of an embarrassment — the equivalent of lending undue credence to horo-
scopes or the healing powers of crystals. In any case, I do not believe it was the sort of pub-
lic position an agent would take whose covert role was to smother interest in UFOs.

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CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

Dr. Donald Menzel, the tenth member, was chairman of Harvard's De-
partment of Astronomy and head of the Harvard Observatory for Solar Re-
search. Prior to Philip Klass, Menzel was this nation's foremost debunker of
UFOs. By the time the Majic-12 briefing would have been given Eisenhower,
Menzel was already known for his books and statements dismissing UFO
sightings as being due in every case to poor observations of natural causes
such as ice crystals, temperature inversions, fog, mist, planets, meteors, light
reflections or refractions and the like, and manmade flying objects such as
aircraft, rockets, and weather balloons. Menzel, who called UFOs "a fright-
ening diversion in a jittery world," once characterized his debunking UFOs
as having given him a reputation as "the man who shot Santa Claus." 33

Klass, inheritor of Menzel's mantel, theorizes that the distinguished
Harvard astronomer was listed as a Majic-12 member by the hoaxers re-
sponsible for the document as "punishment" — a way of suggesting Menzel
was not only a fool but a liar. On the other hand, Menzel's appointment
might only have reflected the desire to have a "house skeptic."

General Robert M. Montague, the eleventh member, was director of the
Anti-Aircraft and Guided Missiles Branch of the U.S. Army Artillery
School. He was also commanding general of the Atomic Energy Commis-
sion installation of Sandia Base in Albuquerque. If a saucer had actually
crashed in New Mexico, he would have known. And if an operation were
mounted to shoot these intruders out of the skies, he would have been in
charge of organizing it.

The last man was scientist Dr. Lloyd V. Berkner, executive secretary of the
Joint Research and Development Board under Dr. Vannevar Bush. Dr.
Berkner also chaired the committee whose study led to the establishment of
the Weapons System Evaluation Group. Berkner subsequently served on the
"Robertson Panel," a civilian scientific advisory panel requested by the Eisen-
hower White House, chaired by Cal Tech mathematician Dr. H. P. Robert-
son and convened and funded by the CIA. The purpose of this panel was to
study the Air Force's most tantalizing Project Blue Book UFO reports. The
Robertson Panel met for only four days, January 14-17, 1953, reviewed just
twenty-three cases, viewed some films, then drafted its classified final report.
This paper, signed by Berkner, concluded that although there was no evi-
dence that UFOs were a direct threat to national security, such phenomena
could become a threat if the great mass of reported sightings were to con-
tinue. Unless such reports could be eliminated, or at least greatly diminished,
the Robertson Panel noted, the accounts might create "morbid national psy-
chology in which skillful hostile propaganda could induce hysterical behav-
ior and harmful distrust of . . . authority." In an interesting perceptual shift,
the panel made not the UFOs but the reports themselves the opponent. The

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193

panel's consequent recommendation was to create an aggressive public edu-
cation program of "training and debunking" to result in a "marked reduction
in reports" and the concomitant loss of public interest in UFOs.

Skeptic Philip Klass's response to Berkner's inclusion in Majic-12 mem-
bership was to wonder why so busy a scientist as Berkner, a Ma jestic-12 Group
member privy to the real story, would take part in another time-consuming
study and then sign his name to a report whose findings he knew to be un-
true. In a perfect world, that would be a perfect question. But it is an imper-
fect world; I think it quite possible Berkner would lend both his time and his
name to what Majic-12 and the President considered an important "disinfor-
mation" campaign.

Within the body of the Majic-12 briefing document was the informa-
tion that the disc recovered from the Roswell crash was "most likely a short-
range reconnaissance craft," a conclusion based on the disc's small size and
its "lack of any identifiable provisions." The document further pointed out
that based on Bronk's autopsy of the craft's four dead occupants, it was ten-
tatively concluded that "although these creatures are human-like in appear-
ance, the biological and evolutionary processes responsible for their
development has apparently been quite different from those observed or
postulated in homo sapiens. Dr. Bronk's team," the report continued, "has
suggested the term 'Extra-terrestrial Biological Entities,' or 'EBEs,' be
adopted as the standard term of reference for these creatures until such a
time as a more definitive designation can be agreed upon."

According to the Majic-12 document, "numerous examples of what ap-
pear to be a form of writing were found in the wreckage." Attempts to de-
cipher them were "largely unsuccessful." Unsuccessful, too, were attempts
to discover how the disc was powered: "Research along these lines has been
complicated by the complete absence of identifiable wings, propellers, jets
or other conventional methods of propulsion and guidance, as well as a total
lack of metallic wiring, vacuum tubes or similar recognizable electronic
components. (See Attachment 'F.') It is assumed that the propulsion unit
was completely destroyed by the explosion which caused the crash."

The briefing document explains how the need for "as much additional
information as possible about these craft, their performance characteristics,
and their purpose" led to the establishment of U.S. Air Force Project Sign
in December 1947; and that in order to "preserve security, liaison between
SIGN and Majestic-12 was limited to two individuals within the Intelli-
gence Division of Air Material Command. . . . SIGN evolved into Project
GRUDGE in December, 1948. The operation is currently being conducted
under the Air Force code name BLUE BOOK, with liaison maintained
through the Air Force officer who is head of the project."

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CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

The document continued: "On 06 December, 1950, a second object,
probably of similar origin, impacted the earth at high speed in the El
Indio— Guerrero area of the Texas-Mexican border after following a long tra-
jectory through the atmosphere. By the time a search team arrived, what re-
mained of the object had been almost totally incinerated. Such material as
could be recovered was transported to the A.E.C. facility at Sandia, New
Mexico, for study."

A second object had been recovered! But in all the literature I've come
across in this field, I have seen no serious investigation into whether this re-
port was real.

The final paragraph of the briefing document stresses that "implications
for the National Security are of continuing importance" since "the motives
and ultimate intentions of these visitors remain completely unknown." It
refers to the "significant upsurge" in the wave of sightings beginning that
May (1952) and continuing through the fall and how this increase "has
caused considerable concern that new developments may be imminent."
(The period referred to includes the sensational radar and visual sightings of
"targets" over Washington, D.C., on two successive weekends in July; but by
the time this briefing paper was allegedly written, the reported sightings had
diminished to the normal number of four to five a week.) "It is for these rea-
sons, as well as the obvious international and technological considerations
and the ultimate need to avoid a public panic at all costs, that the Majestic-
12 Group remains of the unanimous opinion that imposition of the strictest
security precautions should continue without interruption into the new ad-
ministration. At the same time," the document concludes, "contingency
plan MJ-1949-04P/78 (Top Secret — Eyes Only) should be held in continued
readiness should the need to make a public announcement present itself." 34

So what are we to make of this document? If it is real, then flying saucers
are real, and so is the crash near Roswell, New Mexico. If it isn't real, then
we're back to square one.

Over the years there has been considerable nattering over the Majic-12
document's minutiae: the odd punctuation of its dates, for example — the
comma after the month as in "18 November, 1952," which may or may not
have been standard policy in those days. Skeptics have questioned the list-
ing of the Majic-12 Group leader as "Admiral Roscoe H. Hillenkoetter" in-
stead of "Admiral R. H. Killenkoetter," arguing that he so loathed his first
name he would not have tolerated seeing it in print. And although each
sheet is marked as "COPY ONE OF ONE" I find it curious that the pages
are not numbered; my experience with highly classified papers in the late
1950s was that each page would note both its number and its location in the
document, as in "PAGE / OF 18 PAGES."

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But these complaints pale before the single strongest argument against
taking the Majestic-12 documents seriously: the manner in which they sur-
faced in the first place. They arrived on a roll of undeveloped 35 mm film sent
in unmarked envelopes to a Los Angeles television documentary film pro-
ducer who, conveniently and coincidentally, just happened to be having
lunch that day with the co-author four years earlier of The Roswell Incident,
a thin book alleging the crash of a flying saucer in New Mexico, the recov-
ery of alien bodies from its wreckage, and a subsequent government cover-
up of what had been found.

The Majestic-12 documents' confirmation of Moore's journalistic ex-
pose' provides him with the primary motive for having faked them: he had
the most to gain from public disclosure of the document's contents. And yet
Moore didn't disclose them; instead, he and Shandera spent the next two
years keeping silent about their existence while they set about trying to
establish their authenticity. And only then did they go public, in a press re-
lease that stated, "Based upon research and interviews conducted thus
far . . . the document and its contents appear to be genuine. . . ." 35

And that's the dilemma. The document does appear genuine. There is
outside evidence that supports such a conclusion: the Canadian scientist's
top-secret memorandum stating that "flying saucers exist," which alludes to
the "concentrated effort . . . being made by a small group headed by Dr.
Vannevar Bush" to gather material on them. There is the apparently au-
thentic General Nathan Twining secret memo reporting that the UFO phe-
nomenon is "something real and not visionary or fictitious." There is the
unassailable logic of the membership of the Majestic-12 Group.

And then there is that curious "Briefing Paper for the President of the
United States on the Subject of Identified Aerial Vehicles (IAVs)" Linda
Moulton Howe reports was shown her during her April 1983 meeting with
the Air Force Office of Special Investigations agent at Kirtland Air Force
Base outside Albuquerque. In an October 1987 letter to the editor and pub-
lisher of Just Cause, Linda wrote of that briefing paper:

There was no designation of a specific president nor do I remember a spe-
cific date. Agent Doty said he had been asked by his superiors to show me
the briefing paper, that I could ask questions, but could not take notes.
The content described a series of crashed UFO discs at Aztec and Roswell,
New Mexico; Kingman, Arizona; and a crash in Mexico. Extraterrestrial
bodies from the downed crafts were retrieved and taken to laboratories for
examination. The paper also described information from direct contact
with the "Grays" about their extraterrestrial intervention and manipula-
tion of the human race's biological, sociological and religious evolution.
The paper outlined the government's efforts since the 1940s to ascertain

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CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

the origin, nature and motives of the E.T.'s through project Sign, Grudge,
Gleem, Pounce, Blue Book and others and concluded with a list of some
current projects: Sigma (communication with E.T.s), Snowbird (E.T.
craft technology and efforts to fly one), Aquarius (overall research and
contact programs re: E.T.s) — and one "closed" project with name similar
to Garnet which involved the E.T. connection with human evolution. 36

Linda would not have made this story up.

Where does this leave us? With a big question mark. Because with
Richard Boylan's account of his "six-state grand tour of reported Southwest
secret sites" in mind, and his tale of having stealthily made his way across
the desert toward Groom Lake and Area 51 at night, there is this tantalizing
item from the November 1, 1993 "Periscope" section of Newsweek:

THE MYSTERY AT GROOM LAKE

Is the Air Force testing a new supersecret aircraft code-named "Aurora," at
its Groom Lake facility in Nevada? The air force denies the existence of
such a project. But Newsweek has learned that Air Force Secretary Sheila
Widnall on Sept. 30 asked Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt to close 3,900
acres of public land in Lincoln County, Nev., for the "safe and secure op-
erations of activities on the Nellis Range."

Why? In recent months reporters and aviation buffs have stationed
themselves on two hills on the land, which overlooks Nellis's top-secret
Groom Lake facility. From there, peering through long-range lenses, they
can see activities at Groom Lake, known inside the air force as Area 51.
They say they've seen up to six Boeing 737 commuter jets a day flying
workers in from Palmdale and Burbank, Calif., and from Las Vegas. And
they report night flights of a craft that, judging from its lights, has extra-
ordinary maneuverability.

Now Widnall has moved to shut down the Groom Lake bleachers.
The hills are part of the 3,900-acre tract she's asked Babbitt to close off.
An air force spokeswoman confirmed Widnall's request. At Interior, a
spokeswoman said: "We gather the air force wants the land to create a vi-
sual barrier, a buffer to keep the public from looking into part of the Nel-
lis Range the air force wants to keep secure."

Aviation expert Bill Sweetman, who's written a new book on the "Au-
rora" mystery, notes that the remote Groom Lake facility is so costly to op-
erate that the air force generally uses other bases for its standard secret
projects. "So what's going on at Groom Lake that Widnall has been per-
suaded she must hide?" he asks. 37

Boylan would have us believe they are hiding flying saucers. And Linda
Moulton Howe says they are — or were — being built under the name Proj-
ect Snowbird.

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After the dinner with Boylan, we drift back to our hotels. It is not until I
am back in my room in the Eliot that I realize I never got around to ques-
tioning Boylan about his abduction! I had been to busy listening to his story
to ask.

As I go back over my notes I come upon my favorite line of the day. It
was from the person who compared an alien abduction to Peter Pan com-
ing down from the sky to float the children out of their bedrooms accom-
panied by Tinker Bell, a little ball of light. It makes me think of J. M.
Barries line in Act IV of Peter Pan: "Do you believe in fairies? ... If you be-
lieve, clap your hands!"

What is the sound of one hand clapping, I wonder, one small, gray-
colored hand with three cartilaginous fingers and no opposable thumb?

CHAPTER VI

At the Conference

Day Five

The first speaker Wednesday morning, June 17, this last day of the confer-
ence, is David Gotlib, M.D., a Canadian therapist and editor of the Bulletin
of Anomalous Experience, a small publication that describes itself as "a net-
working newsletter about the UFO abduction phenomenon and related is-
sues, for mental health professionals and interested scientists, [which tries
to] 'comfortably tread the narrow path between the groves of academia and
the dust and heat of the marketplace, inquiring and suggesting, not assert-
ing or insisting.' " Dr. Gotlib's talk is titled "Ethical Issues in Dealing with
the Abduction Experience."

"The data we are working on is subjective experience rather than ob-
jective evidence," Gotlib reminds us. "The problem is the lack of physical
evidence." And it is because of this lack, he suggests, that a "backlash is in
effect. Our primary goal is to help the experiencers. We need more mental
health professionals."

Gotlib proposes that the motto of the group dealing with the abductees
should be "Above all, do no harm."

"We must be able to demonstrate to our colleagues," he continues, "that
what we are doing is reasonable, safe, and effective. We have precious little
clinical evidence or clinical data to defend our work." And because of that,
Gotlib warns, investigators and therapists dealing with the abductees run
the risk of malpractice.

Gotlib sketches out a "worst-case scenario": "An abductee has a break-
down," he says. "A family member feels the intervention of an investigator is
responsible for that breakdown and accuses him of being guilty of negligence.
An investigator must realize that an abductee is vulnerable." Legal action
would open up a Pandora's box, Gotlib says. "Think of the media leaping on
this story. If there is a. government cover-up, such a story would provide them

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with a chance to destroy the movement. It would be disastrous for the wit-
nesses, the therapists, and the investigators."

Gotlib concludes with the observation "It's high time we came up with
a set of standards."

There is a good comment from one of the audience drawing a parallel
between the dangers of treating abductees and current cases of therapists
who while treating ritual abuse victims have been accused by members of
the victims' families of having been responsible for presenting the idea of
abuse into the victims' minds. He is referring to the false memory syn-
drome.

Dr. Stuart Appelle, who's with the Department of Psychology at the
State University of New York's Brockport campus, agrees with Gotlib that a
set of standards is needed, but points out that these standards already exist.
"I've got a message," he tells the conference attendees. "Many investigators
in ufology are not acting professionally. There art 1 standards for professional
researchers, and they are not following these standards. Dealing with human
subjects is not a simple issue, so there have been guidelines that have been
set up. And the way to enforce those guidelines is to ensure that: first, there
is no funding for people who do not follow the guidelines; second, there
is no publication for people who do not follow the guidelines; and third,
there will be sanctions against people who do not follow the guidelines."

Appelle then throws a scare into those investigators associated with aca-
demia: "There exists a Federal Policy for Protection of Human Subjects doc-
ument," he reports. "If you are associated with virtually any academic
institution and you do not comply with these federal guidelines, you could
create a situation in which the university would lose funding for research."

Jenny Randies rises to point out that she published guidelines in her
Science of the UFOs appendix ten years ago.

A panel of abductees provides the final presentation of the conference.
They are to address us on "What Has and Hasn't Helped Me."

The first to speak is Mary, the communications specialist who, during
yesterday's coffee break, had talked to me about giving the aliens her coop-
eration and her body and their giving her a koan in return. " 'Dual refer-
ence' was of immeasurable help to me to control my experiences," she says.
"I have nothing to fear because we are all alike. Knowing this has helped me
to control my fear."

Bob, an older male abductee from Maine, says, "As a youngster I was al-
ways looking out of the corners of my mind not knowing what was coming
next. I was always stressed out. Every time I was in therapy and wanted to
get into the realm of the unknown, the therapist would say, 'We're not going

200 CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

to talk about that. How do you feel about your parents?' Their attitude was,
'It's not a tangible reality, so it's not something we can deal with here.' "

He mentions his childhood dreams of a glowing blue light and suggests
it might be helpful to have theologians brought into the abduction study,
"because we're beginning to get into that now. The multiple appearances of
the Virgin Mary, for example. A theologian might be handy as a reference
person, because I think all of these incidents are interrelated."

John Mack rises to say, "You, the experiencers, are in charge of this
product, not us."

One of the abductees suggests the implants are tracking devices, or pods
that can be activated to promote change and growth.

An abductee mother of two children says, "My son was taken from his
crib at eight weeks; my daughter was taken when she was six. They don't
know how deeply I am involved. I think all this is a spiritual happening, but
I want you therapists to be able to help my children when the memories
begin to surface for them."

A male abductee in his thirties says, "Two years ago I finally got in touch
with the right people. Support groups have been a great help for me."

The last abductee says, "I think the intentions of both the humans and
the Beings should be studied very carefully."

There are some inconsequential closing comments by Dave Pritchard
and John Mack and the conference is over.

We begin to file out; little groups gather together in the hallway or out-
side in the sunshine on the lawn. I search out Alice and Carol. They seem
hesitant to leave, unwilling to separate from the support and understanding
they have found here. We end up talking together and they agree to let me
interview them this evening.

Alice and Carol come to my hotel room around six p.m. The refrigerator is
stocked with snacks; I have picked up a bottle of vodka and one of white
wine. I have set up my tape recorder and notes. After I make them each a
drink they settle into the couch, their legs curled up beneath them.

CHAPTER VII

Postconference Interview

Carol and Alice in Boston

Carol Dedham eyes my tape recorder, then lights the first of the more than
a dozen cigarettes she will smoke during the next three hours.

Alice Bartlett is a heavy smoker, too. Physically sorter than Carol — less
angular — she flips her long, straight, pale blond hair behind her shoulders
and leans back into a corner of the couch. Neither of the women is wearing
makeup other than a faint lipstick. As the light from the end table falls over
Alice, I am again struck by how much she looks like Andrew Wyeth's por-
traits of the young Helga.

"Since we want to cover the whole story," I say, "I guess the best place
to begin is with what is happening to you. What do you think is going on?"

Alice and Carol exchange looks; then Carol says, "We don't know! We
don't know the source of the problems we've been having."

"What's happening is a lot of strange things we can't explain," Alice
says. "A lot of things that just seem to make no sense in what we know as
reality. It's very hard to tell whether what we're seeing, what we're feeling,
what we're experiencing is something normal. Especially when you know in
the back of your mind that it's not normal! That there's something going on
that you just can't explain."

"You said it was very hard to tell if what you were seeing was real," I say.
"What are you seeing?"

"It's missing time!" Carol says, suddenly anguished.

"I think you have to start with the missing time in December," Alice
says, nodding.

"First of all, you have to understand that before any of this came about,
before we started asking ourselves questions about any of this, we didn't
know anything about this abduction stuff," Carol tells me. "We didn't know
anything about any of what we even then considered 'weird junk' or 'strange
stuff.' We were aware, of course, of UFOs — "

202 CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

"We'd seen Close Encounters of the Third Kind." Alice explains.

"Right," Carol says, "and it was all fascinating stuff. But then in Sep-
tember 1990 we had our first experience. That was when we saw lights out
behind the house, and we went out onto the back deck to look at these
strange lights that we thought were helicopters. . . ."

It was a Friday evening. Alice, Carol, and Alice's younger sister Grace were
lingering over after-dinner coffee in the dining room of their farmhouse
when they noticed, visible through the sliding glass doors that led from the
dining room to the back deck, strange, brilliant-white lights in the night-
time sky. Leaving their coffee, the three women pushed back from the table
and stepped out onto the deck to take a look.

High in the sky to the west, on a line between the tool shed and the
horse barn, three bright white lights floated in a triangle. Off to the south,
to the left of where the women were standing, were more lights. They
weren't stars; the women were certain of that. Initially, they thought they
might have been seeing helicopters with their spotlights on. Small Army
bases dot that part of Maryland. But, Carol remembers thinking, if they
were helicopters, they were behaving oddly.

As the women watched, the three white lights appeared to be ap-
proaching, though the light at the top of the triangle seemed to be lagging
just a little behind.

For several minutes Carol and Alice and Grace watched the lights grow
brighter and brighter, until they knew that if the lights were from heli-
copters, they would have been able to hear the rhythmic beating of rotor
blades above the normal cacophony of that warm, autumnal country night.
And then, abruptly, all the rural night sounds ceased. No longer did the
women hear the ratcheting of cicadas and crickets, the call of the peepers,
the distant barking of dogs, the muted creak and thump of the stallion stir-
ring restlessly in the barn. In fact, as the lights became blindingly bright, the
night fell absolutely still. They heard no sounds at all.

Suddenly, one of the points of light streaked away from the other two
so swiftly it left a white track on the women's retinas.

"Whoa!" Carol cried. "Look at that! Look at that!"

"Did you see it? Did you see it?" Alice excitedly asked.

"I'm going out front!" Grace said. "I'm going to see where it went!"
Alice's sister ran back through the dining room, the living room, and out the
French doors that opened onto the front porch.

Later, describing this incident to me in my Boston hotel room, Carol
tells me, "The light shot off to the northeast at such a tremendous speed

Postconference Interview: Carol and Alice in Boston

203

that when it appeared to our right in a different place, it was as though it
had left this trail of light behind it."

Carol remembers quickly checking to see if the other two lights had also
moved. They hadn't. They remained in line above the barn and shed. She
recalls watching the third light with Alice for a couple of minutes more, and
then the light seemed to zoom away from them in a straight line and dis-
appear. A moment later, Grace poked her head through the opening in the
sliding glass doors leading out to the deck and reported, "There's nothing
out front."

What was puzzling to Alice and Carol was that their memories of what
they had witnessed did not match. Alice recalls there having been five
lights, an additional two had been in a row to the left, to the west of the
three in the triangle. Carol remembers Grace commenting on two lights
that she had seen in the south. Alice recalls having watched the lights for a
while and then, because she was getting cold (Carol recalls the evening was
warm), going back into the house while Carol and Grace remained outside
to watch. Carol says Alice stayed with her the entire time the lights were
visible. Carol thinks they were visible for about five minutes; Alice thinks
they were visible for half an hour. Alice does not recall Grace being outside
at all.

What the two women did agree upon, however, was that they had never
felt in any danger. Rather than being afraid, they had been excited, thrilled
at seeing something that few people, they then believed, ever saw.

"When in September did this incident occur?" I ask.

"Early September," Alice says.

"Right after the Labor Day holiday," Carol adds,
v "Were there other horses in the barn?"

"Not at night," Alice answers. "We only keep the stallion in at night."

"And you have two dogs? Isn't that right?" I ask.

"Yes," Carol says.

"While this was going on with the lights," I ask, "how did the dogs be-
have?"

Carol suddenly inhales sharply. Her whole body goes rigid, as if she
were having a seizure. And then she doubles over, covering her face in her
hands.

"Are you all right?" Alice asks, moving quickly to place her arm around
Carol's shoulders.

Carol is hyperventilating, struggling for self-control. "I'm sorry!" she
whispers.

I have no idea how to help Carol. I want to comfort her, but I am not
sure my touching her right now wouldn't terrify her even more. She has bur-

204 CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

rowed into Alice's bosom like a frightened child. Suddenly Carol stiffens
and again cries out. She is clearly terrified of what she is seeing.

Alice shoots me a look. "Flashback," she explains.

Carol is still whimpering, but she is regaining control. After a few mo-
ments she says, "Ohhhh, okay. Okay." And then, her voice a bit stronger,
she adds, "It must be the city I'm in. These things have a horrible effect, I
swear."

"It's okay," Alice says, quietly. "It's all right."

"Okay," Carol says even more strongly. And then, as if she were notic-
ing my tape recorder for the first time, she forces a laugh and says, "Cut!"
Neither Alice nor I speak.

Carol struggles to breathe deeply and exhale slowly. "They scared
Killer," she says.
"Who?" I ask.

"One of our dogs," Alice explains to me. She turns back to Carol and
asks, "When?"

"I don't know," Carol says.
"What did you see?" Alice asks her.

"I can't breathe!" Carol protests. She is still trying to catch her breath.
"We have one dog . . . I'm very attached to . . . Killer." Carol is forcing out
her words between gasps for air. "She found us when she was about four to
six weeks old . . . just ran across the yard . . . this tiny ball of white fur . . .
adopted us . . . never left. We named her Killer because she lived off crick-
ets. She was Cricket Killer until we shortened it. But I'm very attached to
this dog and — and — " She again shakes her head as if to clear it. "And I
don't know what I saw."

But Carol does know. And as the memory returns she begins once more
to speak: "Killer was scared. And she was crying and she ran. . . . She ran
around and . . ." Carol's voice is becoming shaky. "She ran around the
house, the other side of the house. Around the back side of the kitchen. ..."
Carol is losing it again. She begins to cry; her voice rises, becomes squeaky:
"Killer ran downstairs and she was whimpering and squealing. . . ." Carol is
crying hard now. "And I don't know why!"

"It's okay," Alice says.

"This was not the same September 1990 incident with the three bright
lights, the saucers'?" I ask. "Is this something entirely different?"
"/ don't know!" Carol says.

"We didn't have Killer then," Alice says. "She came to us probably about
two weeks after that saucer sighting." She turns back to Carol. "How big
was Killer?" she asks. "Was this recent?"

"She was a dog," Carol insists. "I mean, she was grown."

Postconference Interview: Carol and Alice in Boston

205

"This is why we don't trust memories!" Alice says. Her voice., too, is an-
guished. "We have no idea what's going on!" Her eyes, too, now fill with
tears.

To the best of Carol's and Alice's recollection, after the September sight-
ing of the triangular array of lights behind their farm, there had not been
another UFO experience until fifteen months later: mid-December 1991.

On December 15, Carol had been to visit her parents in Hagerstown, about
seventy miles west of the horse farm, and was driving Alice's aging Toyota
back on a Sunday night. It was, again, about eight-thirty, very dark. And the
night was warm enough for Carol to be driving coatless with her side win-
dow half-open. She was about a half-dozen miles from the entrance to their
farm on Route 32, the two-lane blacktop road she normally took.

The road could be heavily traveled during some periods of the day, but
at that hour on a Sunday evening Carol could expect only local traffic, and
not much of that. That night, in fact, she had passed no cars on that stretch
of state highway at all.

Carol had just come over a rise; there was an open field on her right,
and the gravel driveways of a couple of houses set some distance back on ei-
ther side of the road.

Just beyond the rise the road curves gradually to the right and cuts be-
tween twin groves of mixed pine and deciduous trees. As Carol approached
the trees, she was startled to see three bright white lights in a row, visible
through the tops of the pines on the left-hand side.

She wasn't frightened; she just thought, " Wow.'lts them! They look like
the same lights!"

Carol pulled to the side of the road next to the mailbox for one of the
houses. She was thinking she ought to find somebody, go to one of the
houses and get the people out so that they, too, could see the lights. But nei-
ther of the houses had any lights on — a detail that, for such an hour on a
Sunday evening, would later strike her odd, although it did not make any
impression on her at the time.

She put on the car's warning blinkers, rolled down her side window the
rest of the way, and leaned out to get an unobstructed look across the road
at the lights. Even though it was wintertime and the leaves of the deciduous
trees had fallen, there were enough pines in the grove to prevent an unim-
peded view. Still, the lights were so bright the whole area was lit up. Carol
decided to leave the car to get closer.

She walked about thirty yards down the right-hand gravel shoulder of
the road to where she knew a dirt country road cut to the left like a firebreak

206 CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

through the trees. From there, she felt, she would be able to see the lights
clearly. Across from the dirt road, she stopped and turned to look. It was ab-
solutely quiet. There were no night sounds at all.

The lights remained in a horizontal row over the trees. She was deter-
mined to discover what was causing them; she wanted to make out details,
but she was blinded — the lights were so bright they hurt her eyes. Frus-
trated, she shielded her eyes with her hand and peered up through her fin-
gers. Suddenly, as before, one of the lights shot away, this time straight over
her head. Carol spun around to see where it had gone and discovered it was
now above her. It was huge and hovering directly overhead, seemingly so
close she could reach up and touch it. Its brightness illuminated every-
thing.

Standing there alone on the gravel shoulder of the road, Carol couldn't
understand why there weren't other people gathered around her looking up
at this light, too. Why hadn't other cars come along and stopped? And why
hadn't the inhabitants of the two houses come running out?

Carol tried to make out its details. She thought she could see two
smaller blue lights on either side of main beam; and then she wondered if
the remaining two bright white shining objects were still over the trees. As
she turned back to look, she blinked. When she opened her eyes again, she
was five miles away in Alice's Toyota, making the right-hand turn off Route
32 onto the road that leads to the farm.

She has no recollection whatsoever of what happened between the mo-
ment she looked away from the huge, brilliant object overhead and blinked
and when she found herself turning onto the driveway to the farm. "I don't
have an inkling!" she tells me that night in my Boston hotel. "Not a clue as
to what happened in between. It's just a total blank to me, except that when
I arrived at the farm I was completely disoriented and I felt like I wanted to
throw up. My nose was running, my eyes were watery as though I had been
crying for hours, and I had no idea what those reactions were from!"

Carol parked Alice's Toyota in the garage, got out, and made it as far as
the laundry-room passageway between the garage and the house before she
collapsed in front of Alice's sister Grace.

Grace quickly knelt on the linoleum next to Carol. "What happened to
you? Are you all right? You're bleeding!"

"Bleeding?" Carol asked groggily. "Where?"

"Your ears.'Your earlobes! Both of them! You're bleeding!"

Carol lifted her fingers to her ears. The fingertips of her left hand came
away wet, those of her right spotted with blood. Her head ached; her eyes
burned; she still felt disoriented, nauseous. When she held her fingertips be-
fore her eyes, her hands shook. While Grace ran off" to get a washcloth and

Postconference Interview: Carol and Alice in Boston

207

warm water to clean her off, Carol again touched her earlobes. There was
something wrong with her earrings, but she wasn't sure what it was.

Grace was sponging off the blood when she noticed that Carol's ear-
lobes were swollen and her earrings were in backwards. It looked, she later
told Carol, as if someone had ripped the earrings out of Carol's ears and
then tried to put them back in but had inserted them wrong.

"Where's Alice?" Carol asked.

"Asleep," Grace said.

"Asleep, why? What time is it?"

"A quarter to ten."

"A quarter to ten?" Carol said. "It can 't be!"

She remembered she had noted it was 8:26 exacdy when she made the
turn onto Route 32, which led to their farm. From that turnoff to the farm
was seven and a half miles. So it could not have been but a few minutes later
that she came over the rise and saw the three bright lights above the trees —
say, by then it was 8:32.

Carol had pulled off the road, parked, walked down the gravel shoulder
to the cut made by the dirt road through the trees. And so it would have
been 8:40 at the very latest when she stood looking up at the lights. She had
not been there for more than a couple of minutes before the light on the
right streaked away from the others and hovered overhead. She had then
looked up at its bluish light for maybe another two minutes until she turned
to see where the other two had gone. Therefore, it should have been be-
tween 8:50 and 9:00 when she made the turn into the farm. How could it
now be a quarter to ten? Where had that three-quarters of an hour gone?

Grace helped Carol to stand and walked her to a soft chair in the living
room. Once she saw that Carol was comfortable, she brought her a drink
and sat down with her. From where Carol was sitting she could see the clock
on the fireplace mantel. It was nearly ten.

"How are you feeling now?" Grace asked.

Carol shook her head. "I don't understand what happened. Something
happened and I'm losing my mind. Somewhere between the time I turned
onto Route 32 and pulled into here I lost forty-five minutes!"

The following morning, Carol told Alice only the barest details of what
had occurred: that she had seen the lights again, that she had gotten home
late, and that something strange had happened with her earrings.

"I was afraid she'd fire me!" Carol explained to me at the hotel. "I
thought, Oh God, if she finds out I'm crazy I'll have no place to live!"

Seeing how upset Carol was, Alice had tried to make light of the inci-
dent. She told Carol that she had probably just misread the clock in the
car — and as for the earrings, maybe Carol had slept on them wrong.

208 CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

At that time neither of the women had made any connection between
what had happened to Carol and the appearance of what they had believed
were UFOs.

"It wasn't until the next incident," Alice said, "that we knew something
was wrong. That was about two weeks later, on January second, this year."
"The day after New Year's, 1992," Carol said.

On that first evening of the new year Carol had driven into the nearest town
with good restaurants for an early business dinner. She and Alice were in the
process of establishing and incorporating a riding center for handicapped
children. The tax structure had already been pretty well worked out, and
now they were lining up the nonprofit organizations that would help spon-
sor and run it. Because the immediate postholiday period was normally
slow on the horse farm, Carol and one of her business associates from the
corporation had decided to take advantage of the break to mix business and
pleasure: they would enjoy a leisurely dinner and afterwards go over the pa-
perwork. Carol would sign what had to be signed, and that would be it.

That evening, when they had finished, Carol and the associate walked
out of the restaurant together. "Where are you parked?" the woman asked
Carol.

"Around back."

"I'm out front," the woman said. "Before you go, walk me to my car.
I've got a Christmas present for you and Alice."

At her car, the woman pulled out a shoebox-sized package elaborately
wrapped with expensive Christmas paper and a beautiful red ribbon and
bow.

"My God!" Carol said when she felt how heavy the gift was. "What have
you got in here?"

"It's just food," the woman laughed. "Brownies and fruitcake and cook-
ies and fudge."

"This is so great!" Carol said, beaming. "It's so nice of you to remember
us. Thank you very much!"

"You're very welcome," the woman said, and started to get into her car.
"Oh, wait," she said. "Do you know what time it is?"

Carol started to push up the sleeve of her heavy black velvet jacket, then
remembered she had left her watch back at the farm. But a waitress was leav-
ing the restaurant, and Carol called out to her for the time.

"Eight-thirty, give or take," the waitress said.

Just before leaving the restaurant Carol opened a fresh pack of cigarettes
and slid it into her cigarette case. Now she tapped one out, lit it, climbed

Postconference Interview: Carol and Alice in Boston 20 9

into the club cab of the farm's big Ford F-150 pickup truck, and drove
through town until she could get back on the four-lane highway that con-
tinued southeast about thirteen miles to the turnoff onto Route 91, the two-
lane-blacktop back road to the farm. The truck had dual gas tanks; one of
the tanks was empty, the other registered a quarter full. The truck had had
about a half-tank of gas when Carol started out for the restaurant; so despite
the fact that the Ford only got about eight miles to the gallon when it wasn't
hauling the horse trailer or anything more than one passenger, she knew she
had just enough gas to make it home.

After the turnoff onto Route 91, Carol paused at the blinking red traf-
fic light marking the intersection with the little shopping center that had
closed. Farther along, the 7-Eleven convenience store was all lit up, but
there was nobody there. It struck her as curious that at nine on a Thursday
night no one was at the 7-Eleven buying beer.

It also seemed a little odd that the two low ranch houses across from the
convenience store were dark; not a light shone in the windows of either.
Still, Carol didn't think it was anything to make a big deal of, and she con-
tinued another three-quarters of a mile up Route 91, where there was a slight
incline before the road made a gentle bend to the right.

It was at the top of that hill, just when Carol started into the curve, that
she again saw the three lights.

They were ahead of her, about thirty degrees above the horizon, a little
bit to her left. This time Carol was scared. "Oh, God!" she half-sobbed
aloud. "I know what this is! I know what this is!"

As she watched the three lights come closer, getting brighter, Carol
blinked. Suddenly she was not on Route 91, as she had been, but on Route
32, going forty-five miles per hour through the slow curve to the right past
the open field at the top of the hill just before the groves of pines where she
had seen the three bright white lights through the trees two and a half weeks
before.

In the blink of an eye she had found herself eight miles away on a dif-
ferent road heading in a totally different direction on the other side of the
farm! And out of some sort of reflexive animal terror she floored the accel-
erator.

"I remember blinking and there I was! I can't describe what that feels
like!" Carol tells me. "I was so scared! So scared! I hit the gas! Hit it hard! I
must have been doing at least sixty-five down that road trying to get home
as fast as I could."

Carol sped to the farm and pulled into the driveway. Alice's younger
brother, Greg, was visiting for the holidays. He was standing at the back
door of the farmhouse when he saw the Ford race in. He watched the

210 CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

pickup skid to a halt in a shower of gravel, saw Carol kick open the door,
tumble out, and he hurried over to help. Not saying a word, Greg helped
Carol to her feet and brought her into the little office in the- back of the
farmhouse by the kitchen and sat her down. Alice's sister Grace took one
look at Carol and worriedly asked, "What happened?"

Carol was hyperventilating. Her whole body was shaking. "I don't
know!" she panted. "I don't want to do this anymore. I'm going out of my
mind! I'm crazy! We better do something with me. I'm going to wreck all
the farm's vehicles, kill myself, or I'm going to kill somebody else!"

Alice's brother left Carol with Grace and went out to put the pickup
truck into the garage. Carol's briefcase, her purse, and the Christmas gift the
woman had given her were all on the floor of the cab, where they had fallen.
Greg picked them up, took one more look around to see if there was any-
thing else to bring in, and carried Carol's belongings back into the house.

"Here," he said, passing Carol her cigarette case.

Carol opened the case; the pack inside was empty. "I just filled it!" she
said, surprised. "All my cigarettes are gone. They must have spilled out onto
the floor."

"I cleaned out the truck," Greg said. "I got everything. There's nodiing
left on the truck floor. Your briefcase was there; it had come open. Your
purse was on the floor, too, upside down. And so was the Christmas pres-
ent. Everything was on the floor, as if you had come to a sudden stop."

"I did," Carol said. "When I pulled up to the garage."

"No, I saw you come in," Greg said. 'You skidded. You would have had
to have stopped faster than that. There's another thing: the truck smells
funny."

" 'Funny'? How? In what way?" Grace asked.

"I don't know. It smells ..." Greg thought for a moment. "It smells
heavy. Sort of a dense, thick smell. I don't know how else to describe it."
"Where's Alice?" Carol asked.
"Asleep," Grace said.

Carol glanced up at the kitchen clock, then shut her eyes. It was ten-
thirty. Somewhere, she now suddenly realized, she had again lost nearly
three-quarters of an hour. She began to shake uncontrollably.

The next morning, while Alice was at her EPA job in Washington, Carol
was idly watching Grace straighten up around the Christmas package from
the business associate. It was then that Carol noticed that the ribbon and bow
were missing, that the wrapping paper had been pulled up on one side, and
that one corner of the package had been clumsily repaired with masking tape.
The original package, she knew, hadn't had any masking tape on it at all.

"Grace, let me see that package for a moment," Carol said.

Postconference Interview: Carol and Alice in Boston 2 1 1

Originally the gift had looked as if "it had been wrapped by a pro,"
Carol tells me. "Now it was just gross-looking, like some two-year-old kid
had gotten ahold of it and tried to wrap it, and all he had was masking tape."

Carol was staring at the masking tape, thinking, This was not here be-
fore! What is going on? And then she lifted the package and it didn't weigh
anything! It was like picking up half a cup of water, she later says. Before,
it had been dense, like a two-pound box of fudge; now it felt hollow on
one side. A few minutes later, when Grace removed the wrapping paper
and opened the box, Carol saw that it contained only a half-dozen cook-
ies and a couple of brownies. Her business associate the night before had
said the box had also contained fruitcake and fudge. Where had they
gone?

Carol knew neither Greg nor Grace had been into the box; Alice would
not have opened it before she left for work. Who had opened it? And who
had rewrapped it and sealed it with masking tape? They didn't use masking
tape on the farm.

Carol went out to the truck to see if by any chance someone had left a
roll of masking tape there. She looked between and behind the bucket seats,
in the side pockets, and in the glove compartment. There was no masking
tape to be found. She was just sitting in the cab behind the steering wheel
when she, too, noticed the odor still remaining inside the truck.

Sitting with Alice and me that night in the Boston hotel, Carol de-
scribes the truck's smell as being "like a greenhouse on a hot summer night
that had been closed up. It didn't feel hot; it just had all that organic smell
of heat and high humidity."

There was something else Carol checked. She turned on the ignition
and looked at the fuel gauges. There was still just about a quarter of a tank
of gas remaining. There was no way, she knew, that she could have driven
around for forty-five minutes the night before and not burned up the gas.

The next morning, Saturday, Carol and Alice discussed both what had
happened the previous Thursday night and the incident two and a half
weeks before when she returned with her earlobes bleeding. That Saturday
morning was the first time they thought there might be a connection be-
tween those two events and having seen the lights.

"I think what we need to do is call somebody," Alice said. "There are
organizations who investigate unusual phenomena."

"Alice was just looking for straws in the sky," Carol later told me. "She
was looking for an excuse for what was happening that did not mean that /
had lost control, but rather that control had been taken from me. If she
wanted to make a hundred phone calls to weird people and find a weird ex-
planation that would take the responsibility away from me, let her do it. But

212 CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

I knew in the end I was still going to have to deal with the fact that I was
having a mental breakdown without any idea of why it was happening."

In the Washington phone book under "UFO" Alice found "UFO,
Fund for Research" and dialed the number. Don Berliner answered the
phone. In addition to being founder of the Fund for UFO Research,
Berliner is a UFO investigator and a prolific author of articles and books on
aviation and space topics. Alice explained what Carol was going through,
and Berliner said there were some people around who had been dealing with
this. "We think we know what has happened," he said. "Let me have them
give your friend a call."

"I don't know if she'll be willing to talk to anybody about it," Alice told
him. "But we need somebody's help."

When Alice told Carol that someone from the Fund for UFO Research
would be calling back, Carol said, "Fine, I'll talk to them, but I have noth-
ing to say. If you stick the phone in my ear and I have no choice I'm not
going to be rude. I'll tell them what happened, and they'll tell me to go to
a psychiatrist, and that will be the end of that."

When, a couple of hours later, the fund's researcher, Rob Swiatek, re-
turned Alice's call, it wasn't the end of it at all. Instead, Swiatek opened what
Alice referred to as "a Pandora's box."

Carol learned she wasn't the only one who had seen strange lights in the
sky and then experienced what Swiatek referred to as an "abduction" along
with an episode of "missing time."

Carol had never heard of the phrase "missing time," or the word "ab-
duction" linked with a sense of displacement. "I had never heard of any of
that stuff!" she later said. "I thought it was all weird."

"Oh, by the way," Swiatek said. "Did you save the wrapping paper? I'd
like to take a look at it. And," he added, "your earrings — I want to look at
them, too."

Saturdays could be busy at the horse farm. Weekend riders, clients who
boarded horses, and various other people were continually passing through
the house. Carol could hear Alice in the little office off the kitchen talking
to the woman who came in on Saturdays to help out.

There was some wrapping paper in the dining room and Carol picked
it up. She didn't see any masking tape on it, but she didn't bother to check
if it the was the right paper, because she was thinking, what did it matter?
None of this stuff is real anyway, she told herself, so who cares?

She started toward the kitchen on her way to the office so she could
hand the Christmas wrapping paper to Alice to give to Swiatek, but as she
entered the kitchen she suddenly felt a strange sensation, half-physical, half-
emotional — a lightheadedness coupled with the premonition that she was

Postconference Interview: Carol and Alice in Boston

2 1 3

about to remember something. She was walking past the refrigerator with
the wrapping paper still in her hand when suddenly she wasn't in the
kitchen anymore.

In her mind Carol wasn't in the kitchen; she wasn't anywhere on the fai n.
She was seated in a strange, enclosed space, and, she tells me, she was nud .

She was sitting crouched forward, her arms lying across her thighs,
palms up. Something was pressing against the small of her back, holding her
forward. It wasn't a board or a seat back; it felt more like a rod. It wasn't
pushingher, it was just a steady pressure bracing her, holding her still. Carol
didn't resist it. She didn't think she could resist it. She felt paralyzed.

She could not turn her head; she could move just her eyes, and only
from side to side. Carol tried to see where she was. She didn't understand
what was going on. She became aware how cold she was. It was the kind of
cold that invaded her bones. She looked down at her arms and realized for
the first time she was no longer wearing the long-sleeved black velvet jacket
with the cuffs she had had on at the restaurant earlier that evening at din-
ner with the business associate who had given her the gaily wrapped Christ-
mas gift of brownies, fruitcake, cookies, and fudge.

Suddenly Carol sensed she wasn't alone; someone else was there — maybe
even more than one person. But she couldn't see. When she tried to look up,
ahead of her, she saw only a dense, gray mist — except she knew it wasn't mist,
because it didn't move.There was no breeze, no air to stir it. It just hung there
like an impenetrable wall of cobwebs, and Carol felt trapped. She felt
trapped and paralyzed and out of control. And then, when she detected a
movement off to the right out of the corner of her eye, she felt scared.

She knew she was scared, she tells me, but until then she had never re-
alized how scared she could be: straining to look to her right as far as she
could, she saw those hands holding the Christmas package.

She saw those hands and her face screwed up, her throat tightened, and
she started to lose it — because they weren't HUMAN hands!

They looked like a huge tree frog's hands, except the fingers were a dull,
chocolate-charcoal brown! And they didn't have any joints in them.

Oh God, this is really crazy! Carol thought. And she started to cry, be-
cause she knew what she was seeing was real — that these were real hands!
And Carol got the feeling that they were holding the Christmas package as
if to say, " WhoafWhat is this?This is the prettiest thing I've ever seen!"

It was, she explains to me, as if she were seeing a little child pick up
something more beautiful than anything it had ever held before in its life.

And while Carol was watching those hands holding the package, she
was thinking, What the hell « this? What is this thing! And she was still star-
ing at those fingers, at the way they looked like they were made out of hose.

214 CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

She couldn't see any knuckles; the fingers had no definition except for their
somewhat spatulate tips. And there weren't but three fingers on either hand.
Furthermore, there didn't seem to be a thumb. All Carol could see were the
three brownish-gray fingers of the right hand curled two above and one
below the lower right-hand corner of the Christmas package, and two fin-
gers of the left hand cradling the bottom left corner of the box between
them.

The thing, whatever it was, was holding the box out in front of itself as
if to study it. It didn't tilt it or shake it from side to side. Carol could not see
the creature's body, or its head or face. All Carol could see were its two three-
fingered hands poking through the mist, holding the Christmas package,
and she stopped breathing. She was thinking, I can't accept this! I don't
know what this is! I won't accept it! But she could not stop staring at those
hands.

The more Carol looked at the creature's hands, the more frightened she
became. She knew she was beginning to panic, but she couldn't control it.
Her eyes seemed fixed on the thing's tree-frog fingers and she was terrified.
She was hyperventilating; she wanted to scream, she tells me — tried to
scream, "What are you? What is this? What are you doing?" But no sound
would come out.

Carol was telling herself, Don't look at those hands! Don't look! They'll go
away if you don't look! But she couldn't stop staring at them. She couldn't even
blink. She couldn't close her eyes. Instead she felt compelled to look at the
creature's charcoal-brown hands out of the corners of her eyes and she was so
frightened she had begun to tremble. She could feel her whole body shaking.

And then, toward her face out of the mist, there came another chocolate-
brown three-fingered hand, and two of its flattened fingertips touched her
eyelids, pressed them closed, and immediately Carol felt just fine.

All of a sudden she felt, Carol explains, exactly like she had in the six-
ties when she had smoked a little Acapulco Gold and would reach that stage
in a high where everything in the world felt wonderful, but not yet funny —
that point right before the giggles. Only now, she says, she wasn't sitting on
a hilltop smoking marijuana with a bunch of friends; she was with strange
creatures in an entirely strange place, bent forward, naked, with her arms
across her lap, palms up, thinking, Why am I frightened? This isn't so bad.
I feel fine. This is good. . . .

And then she felt someone shaking her and calling her name.

"I found Carol collapsed on the floor at the edge of the kitchen," Alice
tells me at my Boston hotel. "It was like she was reliving all this stuff and all
I could do was hold her."

"And I was going, 'What? What? What?' " Carol says.

Postconference Interview: Carol and Alice in Boston 2 1 5

She leans forward to tap a cigarette out of her case, takes her time light-
ing it, drawing in the smoke, then exhales slowly as she sits back again in
the couch. "That was the end of the memory, or the flashback, or whatever
it was," she tells me, adding, "I didn't know what it was! All I knew was that
something had happened, or that I had had this memory of something hap-
pening — only it wasn't a memory. I was actually reliving it. I wasn't remem-
bering it happening, I was going through the whole event — whatever that
event was. . . .

"It felt like it was happening for the first time," Carol continues. "But I
wondered if maybe the flashback was a memory of what happened during
the time lapse when I was in the truck on January second, because I think
the wrapping paper is what stimulated the flashback — if it was a flashback.
But what was comical about the whole thing — if it could ever be termed
'comical' — was that what had triggered the flashback was the wrong wrap-
ping paper."

"It was not the same paper from the truck," Alice explains.

When Don Berliner and Rob Swiatek from the Fund for UFO Research
later examined the masking tape on the correct Christmas wrapping paper,
it did not differ in any way from tapes commonly available.

The following weekend, on Sunday morning, January 12, Carol awoke
in Pennsylvania with blood on her sheets. She had been invited to stay at a
large farm there to give a three-day seminar, conference, and clinic to ap-
proximately twenty-five horse people. Alice had not gone up with her. The
clinic was to end Sunday afternoon; Carol would spend one more night,
then drive back down to Maryland on Monday morning. Sunday morning
she awoke with her right hand bleeding, and when she washed it, she found
what resembled a burn between the base of her little finger and the wrist of
her right hand, and had no memory whatsoever of how she might have ob-
tained the injury. Carol bandaged her hand, completed the horse clinic, and
returned as planned to Alice's farm.

For the next two weeks, according to Carol, the wound continued to
throb and sting; but it was only when she removed the bandage and saw a
black line forming a perfect triangle around the borders of the injury and,
just outside the black line, a thinner white line, which Carol worried might
indicate an infection, that she decided someone ought to take a look at it.

One of the horse farm's boarding clients, a registered nurse at the local
hospital, looked at Carol's wrist, twisting it back and forth under the light.
"It looks like a chemical burn of some kind," she said. "What did you do to
yourself? The strange thing is that the wound has a laser-sharp edge, like a
laser cut," the nurse explained. "Laser cuts make a perfectly smooth outline
that leave a black edge."

216 CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

When, at the nurse's insistence, Carol showed her wrist to a doctor, the
doctor said the wound could only have been caused by some very caustic
material being applied to the end of a triangular object which was then
pressed against Carol's hand long enough to burn through three layers of
skin. He told Carol he could not understand how she could not know
when or how it had happened. "I mean, it would have been very painful,"
the doctor told her. "Even if you were drugged you could not have slept
through it."

"Well, it happened while I was sleeping," Carol replied. "And I did sleep
through it."

In the middle of the night on February 12, a month after the Pennsyl-
vania incident, Carol was wakened by the sensation of something pulling
on her leg. The next morning she discovered a huge bruise on her right
thigh and the livid prints of three fingers on her leg. She also had three fresh
puncture wounds forming a new triangle on her right thumb. She had no
idea what might have caused them.

The next incident occurred at about 7:20 p.m. on Sunday evening,
March 8. Carol was again returning from her parents' house in Hagerstown
at the wheel of Alice's small red Toyota. She had left Interstate 70 and was
on Route 32 past the B&O railroad tracks, driving up a long incline on the
other side of a small town with a country store, when the Toyota's dashboard
warning lights flashed on, then off. The car's engine died, the power steer-
ing and headlights went out, and Carol had to muscle the darkened, pow-
erless car toward the shoulder of the road, where there would be adequate
clearance to be safe. She pulled the emergency brake, put the gears in neu-
tral, and twisted the ignition key. There was no ignition, no starter grind,
but the headlights came back on.

To conserve the battery, she turned off the headlights and put on the
hazard warning flashers. At first she thought somebody would come by to
help her, but then she noticed there was no other traffic on the road.

Carol got out of the car to peer under the hood. She didn't have a flash-
light, and she couldn't really see anything well enough to know what to look
for. So she left the hood up and went back into the car to wait. The only liv-
ing creature she saw was a wild turkey. It came out of the brush, walked to
the middle of the road, and just stood there looking at her for a few mo-
ments. The turkey then strolled to the other side of the road, where it re-
mained.

About five minutes later, a white car came over the top of the hill from
the opposite direction toward her; the car slowed as it passed, then contin-
ued on. Carol had been unable to see who was in the car, whether it was a
man or a woman driving. She couldn't see through its windshield. But she

Postconference Interview: Carol and Alice in Boston

21 7

could see that the wild turkey was still at the side of the road. A few min-
utes later, the white car came up behind her, slowed down as it passed her,
then accelerated back up and over the hill.
"You jerk!" Carol angrily said to its driver.

When the white car came back over the hill a third time and slowed as
it passed her, Carol grew apprehensive. She watched the car in her rearview
mirror as it descended into the little town, pulled in by the country store,
turned around, came back up the hill, and stopped on the shoulder behind
her with its high beams on.

The car's headlights were so bright Carol had to tip the mirror down so
she wouldn't be blinded. Then she locked the car doors just to be safe. The
window on her side was cracked about an inch to let some air in; the other
windows were shut tight. As she looked in the side-view mirror, she saw the
silhouette of somebody getting out of the car. Whoever he was, he was tall,
at least six feet. And he was wearing a Stetson hat that must have been at
least four feet across. Whoa! she thought. That hat is huge!

She remembers the person coming up to her driver's side and asking,
"Are you having car trouble? Is something wrong?"

"Yes," Carol told him, "my car died. I don't know what's wrong with it.
It won't start."

He had a flashlight with him and went around to the front of the car.
Carol could see him looking down at the engine, flashing the light around,
and then he said, "Start the car."

Carol threw in the clutch, twisted the key in the ignition, and nothing
happened. She tried again. Still nothing.

The figure in the huge hat came around to the passenger side and said
something; Carol couldn't hear what he said, so she cracked the window on
that side and asked him to repeat it. "I don't know what's wrong with it," he
said. "Do you see that light up there?"

Carol looked across the road beyond him. Up the hill, through the
trees, she could just make out a light. "Yes, I see it," she said.

"Well, go up to that house and make a phone call. They'll let you use
the phone."

"Okay," she said. She thanked him for having at least made the effort
to stop. And then she waited until he had gotten back into his white car and
driven off. She remained in her car until she saw a truck coming over the
hill toward her; then she quickly got out, locked the car's door, paused until
she was sure the truck would see her, and crossed in front of it. She wasn't
sure why she did that, but she thought it important to make sure the truck
driver could see that there was a woman out there alone in case that weird
fellow in the huge Stetson came back.

218 CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

Usually Carol can see well in the dark; she possesses considerably better
night vision than most. But that night, as she climbed the gravel driveway
to the house, she could barely distinguish the side of the road from the trees,
and she felt she was tripping all over her feet. She kept slipping on the loose
gravel, stumbling in potholes as she walked and walked and walked up the
seemingly endless driveway toward the light.

In the darkness she didn't see the automobile parked at the top of the
drive and struck her leg on its bumper. She felt her way around to the car's
other side and came to what seemed to be a narrow flight of steep stairs up
the bank to the house.

Carol was leery of the steps; she worried that if she fell and hurt herself,
it might be twenty-four hours before anyone would find her. Instead, she
walked up the bank toward the bright yellow bug light above the back door.
She knocked and was startled to have the door opened immediately by an
elderly woman. Next to her stood a large black Labrador retriever wagging
its tail.

Carol apologized for showing up at her door in the middle of the night
and said, "I know this sounds like a terrible clichd, but my car has broken
down. May I use your telephone?"

"Oh, you poor dear! What an awful thing!" the woman said. "Of course
you can use the phone. Come in! Come in!"

Carol followed the old woman through what she could now see was an
old log house, then up a narrow flight of stairs to the newer second-story
addition containing the living room.

Alice answered the telephone on the third ring, and when Carol told her
what had happened, Alice said she'd be there within twenty minutes to a
half hour.

Carol thanked the old woman for letting her use the phone and followed
her back down the cramped staircase to the back door. The woman had to
wrestle the Lab to keep the dog from following Carol out. Carol closed the
back door behind her, walked down the bank, and suddenly could see every-
thing clearly. She assumed her eyes had merely adjusted to the dark; but then
she noticed it took her just seconds to walk the length of the driveway
back to Route 32 and her car. Now she could see the gravel, the potholes,
the bushes on the other side of the ditch, and behind them the trees. From
the bottom of the earthen ramp to the end of the drive could not have been
more than fifty feet; and yet, when she was walking up to the house, the
driveway had seemed a mile, at least!

Carol crossed to her car, slipped inside, and sat waiting for Alice to arrive.

Twenty minutes later Alice came over the top of the rise in the Ford
pickup, passed Carol in the opposite direction, and continued down to the

Postconference Interview. Carol and Alice in Boston 2 1 9

country store at the bottom of the hill to turn around. At the warehouse
next to the country store Alice noticed a white car parked with someone
standing beside it. And as she turned and paused before heading back out
onto the road, the person got into his car and drove up behind her. She
stopped, watching in her rearview mirror, waiting for him to pull around to
see which way he was going to turn, right or left; but then, suddenly, he was
no longer there. The car wasn't behind her anymore, and Alice had no idea
how he could have simply disappeared.

On the way back to the farm Carol told Alice what had happened and
how tired she was, adding, "God, it seems like midnight."

"It's only nine-thirty," Alice said; and Carol realized she was again miss-
ing time.

Retracing her trip, Carol figured it had been seven-thirty when she
pulled off the interstate and maybe ten minutes later when the car went
dead. "I couldn't have sat in that car more than fifteen minutes," she told
Alice. "Which would have made it only about eight o'clock when the man
in the big hat stopped by. I wouldn't have sat there for an hour and fifteen
minutes. I mean, that's ludicrous! I'm not that stupid! I'd have gone out and
found a phone even if I'd had to walk back down the hill to that country
store!" Carol paused for a moment and asked herself, "Why didn't I? Why
didn'tl do that? There must have been a public phone."

"Because the man told you to make the call from that house," Alice said.

"But why didn't I go to that store and call?" she asked. "And how come,
according to you, it was five past nine when I called?"

The next afternoon, Carol led a tow truck to where she'd left Alice's Toy-
ota. She gave the mechanic the key so he could unlock the car and prepare
it for towing. He opened the door, slid behind the steering wheel, and said,
" Whew! Did you have a fire in here?"

It took a week and a half to fix the Toyota. As Alice later explained, "Its
whole electrical system was fried."

It was then that Carol attempted to discover on her own what had hap-
pened. She had, in the past, done self-hypnosis for relaxation purposes and
decided to hypnotize herself in Alice's presence to make herself remember
what had taken place when the car's electrical system had shorted out.

Everything was just as Carol remembered it: the Toyota died, she pulled
to the side of the road, looked under the hood, got back in the car; the white
car went by once, twice, a third time, and then turned around and pulled
up behind her with its high beams on. Carol looked into the side-view mir-
ror. . . . Everything, so far, had been just as she had recalled. But now, when
she looked at the man reflected in her mirror, he was naked! At least she
thought he was naked.

220

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

"Here was this naked man with a cowboy hat standing in the middle of
the road with the high beams on of his car," Carol explains to me in the
Boston hotel, "and I'm going, This is wild! Tm in the middle of the road
with a stalled car and a kook who's naked, and he's the only one who both-
ered to rf0/>.'What are my odds here?"

Carol remembered it was so funny she couldn't be scared. "He stopped
by me and said, 'What's wrong?' and I said, 'The car won't start,' " her rec-
ollection continues. "All of that was the same, except I'm trying not to
laugh! The whole time I'm thinking, God, don't laugh! If this man's crazy,
he could kill you if you laugh! But I couldn't control it! I'm covering my
mouth with my hand so he won't see me and he goes by and looks under
the hood. He has his flashlight — or there's some kind of light he's shining
around the engine. And I look at his body through the crack between the
back of the raised hood and the top of the dashboard, and I don't see a belly-
button or — or anything/There are no physical features, but there aren't any
clothes, either. And he's white. Like a real pale, shiny white. And then I
heard the voice.

"I heard it say, 'Start the car,' " Carol continues. "Only the voice came
from inside my head! Like it was somebody standing right at the back of my
skull speaking into it. I snapped my head around to see if someone was be-
hind me, but there was nobody there. I knew there wouldn't be anybody
there. And so I heard this 'Start the car' only inside my head. It did not
come from in front of the car. It couldn't have through the raised hood, all
that glass and closed windows. It was almost an order, like 'Don't question
this: Start the car, now. 1 '

"I tried to start the car, and, of course, it wouldn't start. Just the way I
remembered it," Carol says. "Nothing happened. And he walked around to
the passenger side of the car and leaned over and looked in the window, and
this was the first time I really saw him. He had this huge Stetson which I
thought was gigantic — and it was gigantic. But so was his head!

"This fellow had a head the size of three basketballs put together inside
a hat that fi t him! It wasn't that his hat was big, it was his head that was big!
All I could see was one side of his face illuminated by his car's high beams.
His whole side was in deep shadow. And it looked like he had wraparound
sunglasses on, like aviator's glasses. And there were wrinkles, deep furrows
or something, right at the bridge of his nose, and these lines or tucks down
his cheekbone. But the weirdest thing was that he had this mustache hang-
ing down from this little grape of a nose, this thing with sort of a rounded
knob at the end.

Despite her self-hypnosis, Carol couldn't remember anything about
the walk from her stalled car to the house until, as she told me, she had a

Postconference Interview: Carol and Alice in Boston 22 1

flashback during one of the regular Saturday-evening horse-related semi-
nars held on the farm. She got about halfway through her presentation
when suddenly she flashed back to the gravel driveway leading up to the
half-log-cabin house:

There was somebody — or something — a little behind her, to her left,
walking like a machine with short, little, mechanical steps: thump-thump-
thump-thump. ...

Carol had the sensation that he — or it — was there to escort her: to
make certain she went where she was supposed to. She couldn't understand
how its footsteps could be so regular while hers were so stumbling and
erratic.

She looked up toward the end of the driveway, which now, she realized,
wasn't that far. She saw a car parked at the top and a person standing by the
car's left bumper — except he didn't really look like a person. He didn't be-
cause he was glowing!

It was as though he was backlit; only, Carol knew, there wasn't a light
behind him. She could distinguish the car clearly enough to see that it was
a maroon Chrysler K-car with blue-and-gray-striped cloth seat covers; but
she could not make out the features of the person next to it, or any distinct
outlines. She could tell he was short: no more than three and a half or four
feet tall. She was looking straight at him and walking toward him as if she
really wanted to go to him — even though she knew she didn't. And as she
approached this small, glowing Being, he raised his right hand toward her.
She could not see if there was anything in it. He pointed at her and she re-
membered nothing else.

Carol's flashback was videotaped. "All our seminars are videotaped,"
Carol explains, "so when you look at the videotape you can see that there's
a brief break in my presentation. You see me bring my hand up to my eyes
as if I've lost my train of thought. There's a short pause and then I continue
with the seminar. If you hadn't known what was going on, you wouldn't
have known what was going on. I don't think anybody noticed."

Carol subsequently drove back to the house near which the incident
with the man in the Stetson had occurred. The house was really there, as was
the steep bank beside it. Parked at the end of the short, gravel driveway was
a maroon K-car with blue-and-gray-striped seat covers.

"What do you think actually happened?" I ask.

"This is the reverse of what I ever would have thought I'd say or think,"
Carol replies, "but my logical side, my rational side, tells me something hap-
pened to me on that road. And whoever, or whatever it was, thought a real
good disguise to relax a horse person by would be to show up as a cowboy.
My logical, rational side tells me that it was all set up for me to go up that

222 CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

particular driveway at that particular time, and I was either escorted into a
flying saucer, or ... or I was abducted." She pauses for a moment, then
laughs. "That's what my logical side tells me happened. My emotional side
says, 'Nyahhh! You're crazy.'You imagined the whole thing.' "

Alice, reclining next to Carol on my Boston hotel room couch, point-
edly asks, "What about the missing hour?"

Alice then describes her problems with electrical objects: the banks of
streetlights that will blink out as she drives by; the illuminated overhead
turnpike entrance and exit signs that go dark as she passes beneath them;
store lights that shut off as she nears, or how televisions will malfunction,
and radios hiss and crackle with static. Recently both her home and office
computers have developed "lethal errors" when she attempts to use them.

"When I switched to the other computer at work," Alice tells me, "that
one had the same problem: keyboard errors. While I was sitting there, we
had an inexplicable power failure in that half of the station. Maintenance
checked on it and said, 'This is weird, because it's a connected system where
the whole work station should be either on or off.' And it wasn't. Only the
back half was off. They finally fixed it after a couple of days. They had to
take the work station apart because the wiring between the two halves of the
work station had somehow gotten fried. And they'd never had that happen
before."

I ask Alice what scared her most.

For a long moment she is silent. "I think what is really scaring me is not
remembering, not knowing," she says, and begins to cry quietly. "Not
knowing, but knowing somewhere in the back of my memory there's an
awful lot of stuff. And I'm afraid of it! I think that's why I'm afraid of
hypnosis."

Alice pauses to dry her eyes. "My memories aren't like Carol's. I have
very few conscious memories," she explains. "In some ways Carol has vali-
dation: she knows what's going on. All I know is I have a lot of inexplicable
things that seem to indicate, yes, I've been through things similiar to Carol.
But instead of conscious memories all I have is fear."

"What makes you think you've been through things like Carol?" I ask.

"Scars. I have a couple of scars that I've always explained away. They
could be 'scoop marks.' I don't have any conscious memories of missing
time, but there have been many mornings when I've woken up where it's
followed the conference pattern: you don't remember putting your night-
gown on inside out, but when you wake up it's inside out; or you're upside
down in the bed. They're just the sort of little things that lead me to think
something might be there. I've never slept well. I always used to have night-
mares when Iwasakid.butI have no idea what they were about. I slept on

Postconference Interview: Carol and Alice in Boston

223

the top bunk bed; my sister Grace slept on the bottom. Every so often my
parents would find me on the floor because I had fallen out without wak-
ing up. And there were other things I used to explain away. ..."

"Things that happened when you were a child?" I ask.

Alice nods. "I had an awful lot of nosebleeds."

"And do you now think these were caused by implants?"

"No, I think I was just a kid with bloody noses. But I used to wake up
in the morning with fingerprints on my arms, two or three fingerprints on
my upper arms. I bruise easily. I just assumed somebody grabbed me and I
didn't remember it. And there would be bruises on my body that were big
enough that I'd think, 'Gee, I really ought to be able to remember where I
got that!' But I never could, and the bruising was another thing I used to
just explain away."

"The nightmares, the bruises, the marks on your body all could be in-
dications of physical abuse as a child," I say.

"Maybe it is," Alice says noncommittally. "Maybe that's a simpler ex-
planation."

"What is your relationship with your family now?"

"My sister, Grace, and my brother, Greg, are staying with me now,"
Alice says. "My mother died of cancer several years ago. And my father lives
in Florida."

"Are you close?"

"To my father?" Alice asks. She looks at me, trying to decide whether to
answer, and then she says, "Not really."
I say nothing.

"I was a strange child," Alice says, then alternating between tears and a
determination to be objective, she tells me about her childhood.

"I was always very different from most of my family," Alice explains.
"My grandmother, my father's mother, never accepted me. She was con-
vinced when I was brought home from the hospital that they'd mixed up the
children. That there was no possibility I could be her grandchild. My fa-
ther's side was dark, Germanic. My mother had brown eyes and dark hair.
Both my brother and sister have dark eyes and dark hair; I'm blond and
blue-eyed. But my mother had two sisters, one who was blond and the other
a redhead. That was the Norwegian side of the family. And since in a lot of
ways I look so much like my sister, the same build, and that whole side of
the family . . . yes, I really know I'm my mother's child."

"Were you a happy child?"

"No," she says. I see her eyes fill with tears. "I felt abandoned as a child.
I was convinced my parents didn't love me. My father was very authoritar-
ian. He was career military. We always had more fun when he was gone, be-

224 CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

cause he'd be abroad for a year or so. But then it was always 'Wait until your
father gets home.' And we'd put on extra pairs of underwear and jeans be-
cause we knew we'd get beaten with a belt or a paddle. That was normal."
"So it was primarily physical abuse?" I ask.

Alice starts to say "Yes," then hesitates. She glances at Carol and then
back at me. I get the impression she is deciding how far she should go.

What follows next is a confusing account of a fishing trip Alice took in
Florida with her father when she was twelve and her suspicions that he had
raped her on the banks of a canal. She reports matter-of-factly their not
speaking afterwards, her coming home with blood in her underpants, and
her father's evident puzzlement that she would never go fishing alone with
him again.

Alice then immediately tells me of having been in love with "a guy in
high school. We were going to get married and stuff. And my parents said,
'You go to college, then you get married. Have a life first!' And we broke up,
of course. But senior year in high school we were talking about getting mar-
ried, having a dozen kids, the whole bit. At one point I thought I was preg-
nant. My period was a couple of weeks late, and we sort of had a celebration
when it finally came. And then some time later, when I was in college, I re-
alized I hated children. I couldn't stand them! I can't be around them!" she
says, and bursts into tears.

The link between children and Small Grays is an obvious one, and I am
trying to figure out how to bring this up when Alice tells me about the cu-
rious dreams she and Carol had the same night about a month before the
conference.

"It was very, very disturbing and, I guess, clinched what people had been
talking about at the conference for me," Alice says. "Last month I dreamed
I saw four little gray guys standing to my left. I realized they were the Grays
and said, 'Oh, it's them.' I wasn't panicked. I felt maybe a little fear, nothing
more. But it woke me. I looked at the clock. It was four-fifteen, and then I
went back to sleep. The next morning, I mentioned my dream to Carol. And
she asked me what time it had been, because, she said, she had had a strange
dream, too — a dream within a dream, really. She dreamed she awoke from a
dream and saw one gray guy peeking out from behind the dresser in the
doorway of her bedroom. She knew it was a Gray, and then, in her dream,
she went back to sleep and woke up again and — "

"This time I knew there were two gray guys in the room," Carol inter-
rupts. "I sat up in bed and saw two of them standing at the end of my bed
just watching me. I tried to call Alice, but I don't think I could do more than
whisper her name a few times. They didn't come any closer, so eventually I
became sleepy again and just lay back down. But when I awoke in the morn-

Postconference Interview: Carol and Alice in Boston

225

ing my alarm clock was blinking, which means the power had gone off some
time during the night. Then I hit the button that recalls the clock's last reg-
istered time before the outage and it read four-fifteen."

"So it was the same time as mine," Alice says. "But what was so scary
was that after I saw those four little gray guys I developed symptoms like I
was pregnant."

About a week after the dream, Alice explains, her breasts became tender
and enlarged. She was crampy, with twinges and aches in her ovaries and ab-
domen; she had lower back pain. Her period was not normal. "It came and
went in two days with a lot of pain," Alice explains. "I finally went to a doc-
tor. He was convinced I was pregnant; I had all the signs of it. He did a preg-
nancy test which came back negative. And then he did an ultrasound, CAT
scans. I thought it was cancer," she says, smiling wryly. "Anything was
preferable to being pregnant. But there was nothing there! But just after I
had the ultrasound examination I started having another period, within six-
teen days of the previous one. This time there were no cramps, no pain.
Nothing. I don't know what's going on. I have these erotic dreams. I don't
know what's causing it. Something's going on."

"Had you had sexual intercourse during those past months?" I ask.

"Only in my dreams," Alice says, smiling sadly. "But within the last
two months I had a very erotic dream. Including penetration. And I was
sore the next day. But I have no conscious memories of it! I don't know
what happened."

Later I ask Carol and Alice what impact this conference has had on
them.

"First of all, overload," Carol says. "It's been very intense."

"But wonderful," Alice adds. "It was the first time we could talk to other
people, that we haven't had to be afraid of talking about all this. What re-
ally helped me the most is to find other people who experienced things sim-
ilar to what I experienced. And we could sit down and talk about it! I mean,
Carol and I weren't alone anymore. And for me, that was really, really good.
But there were some scary things."

"Like what?" I ask.

"Some of the things they were discussing," Alice responds. "Some of the
bits and pieces they brought out. Carol and I would sort of look at each
other and go — "

" 'One more down the tubes,' " Carol finishes.

"One more what?"

"One more of our rational explanations for what had happened to us,"
Carol says. "We'd hear someone else talking about the same thing happen-
ing to somebody else and I'd go, 'Oh, shit!' "

226 CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

"Like what?" I ask.

"I guess the first one down the tubes for me," Alice says, "was when
Hopkins was talking about scars. And he said, 'Primarily they're on the long
bones, the legs, below the knees; but there are a lot of people who have scars
on their arms and even on their faces.' And I thought, Oh, shit, because I've
had a sort of scoop mark on my face ever since I was a child, and I started
thinking about the explanation for it when I was a little kid — "

"That explanation was crazy!" Carol interrupts, laughing.

"The explanation was that when I was little I had a pinwheel on a stick
and I was standing out there in the wind and I put the base of the dowel
holding the pinwheel to my face and let the pinwheel turn. And that was
what had left the scar."

"Right," Carol says sarcastically. "And can you imagine doing that to
yourself until it made a hole in your face and drew blood?"

"I want to get back to your feelings about the conference," I say. "What
was it like for you the first day?"

"Scary," Alice says. "I was scared of new people, of new things I might
learn. When I arrived here, I was still excited about learning what was going
on and finding out more. I was being all very rational, all very logical, but
that first day was real scary. A lot of it, I think, was because I didn't know
anybody. Richard Hall was our only contact here. It was such a relief to see
him!"

"He was more scared than we were," Carol says.
"Why was that?" I ask.

"Because, in some ways, this abduction stuff is new to him, too," Alice
answers.

"I had a problem with Richard at the beginning of the conference," Carol
says. "I told Alice the second day, Sunday, I said, 'Richard is avoiding md Why
is he avoiding me? He's the only person we've got here!' I really wanted his
support for that panel we were on that night. And Alice goes, 'He's not avoid-
ing you. You're being paranoid. I never saw him avoid you.' And I thought,
'Well, I'm going to talk to him, because I feel this need to get it out.' So I asked
Richard outright, 'What's wrong? Why don't you want to talk to me?' And he
apologized and said, 'In all honesty you scare me. You frighten me.'

"I said, 'What do you mean, I frighten you?' " Carol continues.
" 'You're my support system! How can I frighten you?'

"And Richard said, 'Because I can't help you,' " Carol says. " 'It's too in-
tense,' he told me. 'It scares me and I don't want to do the wrong thing.' But
then he did come around. He came and talked to me whenever he saw me."

"When I saw Richard the first day, I felt very, very relieved," Alice tells
me. "I knew there was someone here we could trust."

Postconference Interview: Carol and Alice in Boston

227

"What about the other abductees?" I ask.

"We had Virginia, of course," Alice says. "We had talked to her on the
phone extensively before we got here. The rest of the people were all
strangers. Some of the names we recognized; we'd read a lot of their books
and stuff. But I have this problem with famous people. I don't stay around
them. I don't deal with them. I'm sort of put off by their famousness."

"Who were the 'famous people'?" I ask.

"Budd Hopkins," Alice says. "Dave Jacobs. John Carpenter. Bruce
Maccabee — "

"Who's Bruce Maccabee?" I ask.

"Maccabee is sort of a clearinghouse for tapes and films. He analyzes
them and stuff," Carol explains. "But the famous people, almost to a man,
weren't terribly interested in talking to us 'experiencers,' heaven forbid, di-
rectly. They would talk to our researchers, our psychologists — "

"Or their own experiencers," Alice says.

"Or their own group. But they would not talk to those of us not con-
nected directly with them, unless we said something during the panel dis-
cussion that struck them in some way. And then," Carol says with a little
laugh, "they'd beat down doors to get to us, whether we wanted to talk to
them or not."

We speak for a while about the other abductees and how their experi-
ences relate to Carol's and Alice's. Alice feels that most of them are at a dif-
ferent point than she is; that they accept elements of the phenomenon that
she is not yet willing to believe are true for her. "I'm sorry," Alice tells me,
"but I cannot believe these gray guys are doing good things, that they're the
old Space Brothers and goodness and light and wonderful stuff. I don't have
any trouble with their believing it, because it helps these experiencers cope.
But no, I can't believe that."

"I'm like Alice," Carol says. "I don't think these other experiencers are
wrong just because they believe what they do and I don't. It's just very hard
for me to accept at this time."

Alice nods and says, "I think that's what a lot of the experiencers were
asking for at the conference: 'Don't put all of us in the same box. And don't
try to make us fit the same box.' I think there are several boxes around,
and . . ." She pauses for a moment, then adds, "I was going to say that I
think they're all valid. But I don't think some of them are."

I ask Alice what "box" she feels she fits in.

"I guess I'm still back with the 'nuts and bolts,' " she says, smiling.
"With Budd Hopkins and Dave Jacobs. These gray guys are not benign.
They're doing things to us against our will. And the most frightening thing
ever is, we have no control."

228 CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

"And I don't think we ever will," Carol adds.

"We won't," Alice says bitterly. "It doesn't matter what we do or think.
They're going to do whatever they want anyway."

"And I think they're going to do it fairly soon. Oh! I didn't want to say
that!" Carol says, putting her fingertips to her lips. "I didn't really mean to
say it out loud. I don't know why I feel that, I just do. I've believed it
strongly — even though I don't know what it is I believe — from the begin-
ning: that we're building tremendous momentum for something spectacu-
lar. Spectacularly good or bad, I don't know. Something really monumental
is about to happen, and I don't know if we experiencers/abductees are in-
volved personally or not."

"I think it's part of their disinformation," Alice says quiedy. "From the
stuff I've read, they've done this to people for so long: 'Oh, yes, next week
or next year is the year. That's when it's going to happen.' The aliens have
lied every time."

"But it's not the kind of feeling where you're going to want to run out
into the streets carrying a sign saying, 'The World Is Going to End Tomor-
row,' " Carol says. "It's more a gut feeling that goes all the way inside you
and says, 'Something is about to happen. You can't stop it.' "

"Does that worry you?" I ask.

"I don't get overexcited about it. It's just there. I can't make it go away."
"And you don't know where it comes from, or whether it's good or bad?"
I ask.

"No," she says simply. "I'm not hearing 'voices.' It has never changed in
intensity from the beginning."
"When was the beginning?"

"I got that first feeling after the initial car episode, when I came back
with my earlobes bleeding and I thought I was having a nervous break-
down."

The three of us are quiet for a moment.

I break the silence, saying, "I guess what strikes me is the loneliness. You
abductees are dealing with something that the rest of us don't understand.
And not only do we not understand it, some of us feel hostile to what you're
telling us. We don't want to hear it. We don't believe you, or we're unsym-
pathetic to you, or we think you're crazy."

"We've always felt extremely sorry for the many people we know out
there who are alone," Carol says. "People who are trying to deal with this
and come home to an empty house or — "

" — a husband or wife — " Alice adds.

" — they can't talk to," Carol finishes. "A friend or roommate they can't
talk to. They have no one to turn to, nowhere to turn. They think they're

Postconference Interview: Carol and Alice in Boston

229

crazy! And it's so hard on them! We have each other," she says, looking to
Alice, "Thank God for that! Even if we don't know what we have, we have
each other."

"But sometimes even that's not enough," Alice says.

"No," Carol agrees, "sometimes it's not. Because sometimes we feed on
each other's fears. We scare each other even when we try not to. Sometimes
we are so logical, we fail to see. We close all the doors and say, 'I refuse to be-
lieve that! That's just too bizarre! So I won't accept it.' "

"Like what?" I ask.

"Like the black helicopters when they first showed up," Alice responds.

There have been accounts in various UFO periodicals of "black heli-
copters" occasionally being seen in areas where UFO encounters have al-
legedly taken place. Nobody is quite sure what the helicopters mean or what
they are supposed to represent. They have no apparent markings, dark-tinted
glass, and may or may not leave a prop wash. According to these reports, the
helicopters fly low, harassing passes over the homes and properties of people
who have had UFO experiences. Depending, on the various theories, the
"black helicopters" either are part of the government involvement in the UFO
cover-up conspiracy or are UFOs themselves, taking the form of helicopters.

When black helicopters began appearing over Alice's horse farm, she
didn't pay much attention to them. "We said, 'Oh, don't worry about it,' "
Alice tells me. " 'We get overflights of all kinds of stuff all the time.' And
that was okay until Mother's Day, when Carol was over at her parents' house
in Hagerstown and her sister looked out the window and said, 'What's this
black helicopter doing up here?' Well, sure enough, when Carol went out
the kitchen to the backyard, where they were preparing a barbecue, here was
this little black helicopter going back and forth a little bit over the house."

"And then it would stop," Carol says.

"What was its altitude?" I ask.

"Probably about five hundred feet," Carol answers. "It was loud! The
windows were rattling. We watched it from the back deck. It would go
across, then stop about two hundred yards away. It would sit and hover at
about five hundred feet, just looking at us. Then it would move off, sit and
hover; move back, sit and hover. Finally, we got tired of looking at it and we
went into the house and it went away."

"That was the last time we saw them," Alice says. "Mother's Day. Al-
most the beginning of April."

"We need somebody to try and help us sort out all of this stuff," Alice
says. "Someone we can trust, who will not give us some sort of mechanical
Anything you think is real is real.' Bullshit! It ain't real! Some of this stuff
ain't real! Help me sort it out!"

230 CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

"I get panic attacks sometimes that are so bad," Carol says. "I sit there and
I go, 'There's nothing to be afraid of. Nothing's going on. The house is fine.
Everything's normal. Everything's good.' But I'm still having a panic attack
and I can't make it go away. You can't talk to anybody. Alice can't help me. She
tries. There are times when there's just nothing you can do for another per-
son. You need somebody out there who knows how to deal with a panic
attack, who has the background, but doesn't have the emotional attachment,
because you can get so wrapped up in it. When Alice gets upset, I get upset.
It's real hard to help somebody when you're as upset as they are."

"We just feed on each other," Alice explains. "Still, despite all we've said,
we're not in all that bad a shape."

"Sometimes you just need a hug," Carol says. "Somebody to say, 'Good
girl!' And sometimes, too, you just need somebody to kick you in the butt
and say, 'Hey, lighten up!' I do that to myself; Alice does it to herself. We'll
be riding along, put a tape in the car, turn it up full blast in the rear speak-
ers, open the windows, and start singing, because sometimes you just need
to lighten up!"

The following morning, Alice and Carol return to their horse farm, and I,
too, drive home. Their trip to rural Maryland and mine to the old Con-
necticut shoreline town in which I live take about the length we think they
should; there is no "missing time."

During the days immediately following the conference, I am struck by
how my perception of the abduction phenomenon has changed: I no longer
think it a joke. This is not to say I now believe UFOs and alien abductions
are real — "real" in the sense of a reality subject to the physical laws of the
universe as we know them — but rather that I feel something very mysteri-
ous is going on. And based as much on what has been presented at the con-
ference as on the intelligence, dedication, and sanity of the majority of the
presenters, I cannot reject out-of-hand the possibility that what is taking
place isn't exactly what the abductees are saying is happening to them. And
if that is so, the fact that no one has been able to pick up a tailpipe from a
UFO does not mean UFOs do not exist. It means only UFOs might not
have tailpipes. As Boston University astronomer Michael Papagiannis in-
sisted, "The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence."

CHAPTER VIII

Postconference Interview

David E. Pritchard, Ph.D.

Two weeks after I left Carol and Alice, I speak with conference co-chairman
Dave Pritchard. I am curious as to whether this M.I.T. physicist's percep-
tions, too, may have changed.

"I must say my own reaction to the conference and, well, putting it all
together," Pritchard says cheerily, "is, I was just wanting to look at this thing
with the hypothesis of simple extraterrestrials here with their super tech-
nology doing experiments. And it isn't that simple. I mean, it can't be that
simple. In science, you always try to find some aspect of a complicated phe-
nomenon that you can understand and explain. Just one little corner of it.
I'm still considering whether it's worth trying to find that one little corner."

"I thought you had tried to do that with the implant," I say, "and come
up with nothing — though that's not to say a negative finding is a bad thing
in science."

"That's right. I mean, I guess if you were trying to support this ex-
traterrestrial hypothesis, you could say I came up with nothing positive.
But I also realized how much harder the whole thing is. That to identify
something like that 'implant' you need an interdisciplinary team: biolo-
gists, chemists, material scientists — and gee whiz! that's not what I had at
my disposal!"*

"But aren't you also suggesting the conference changed your perceptions
of the phenomenon?"

* Some time after the M.I.T. conference, Dave Pritchard did get his wish: Two portions
of Price's implant, designated "Price I" and "Price II," Pritchard reported, were examined
"in collaboration with the pathology group in the Wellman Laboratories of Photo Medicine
at Massachusetts General Hospital." The leader of the group, Dr. Tom Flotte, is a derma-
tologist who routinely examines medical samples.

Flotte's group utilized both light microscopic examination and transmission electron
microscopy on the samples. What Pritchard at the conference had cautiously described
as "three little appendages . . . approximately one-quarter the width of a human hair" found

232 CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

" Yes!" he says. "I now see this thing as a much more complicated phe-
nomenon. You know, when you go to a Dave Jacobs and Budd Hopkins
conference, you only get that hard edge: the table exams, the uncaring alien.
But when you actually start talking to these abductees, you realize they have
a much more complicated relationship with these experiences and with the
aliens than, for example, is portrayed in Jacobs's book. They have much
more feelings of ambivalence.

"My wife, Andy, found a woman in this area who has a tremendous
amount of conscious recollections," Pritchard continues. "And so this
woman came by our house last night, and Joe Nyman was there. Joe was
very intrigued, because usually, as you know, he uses hypnosis on his peo-
ple. And this woman went through not only the whole scenario of the dif-
ferent kinds of aliens, but also the whole dual-reference business of feeling
that she is part alien, of talking about the night she was conceived — I don't
know how much you talked to Joe Nyman ..."

"Not much," I say.

"Well, you remember he gave this very controversial paper on dual ref-
erence? And, actually, I tend to believe him, because I think he's very corn-

sticking out from the implant, Flotte's examination revealed to be not alien antennae but
cotton fibers, possibly from Price's underwear.

"All of the results obtained at MIT indicate that the Price artifact ... is of terrestrial
biological origin," Pritchard's update reported. "The MGH findings suggest a reasonable
scenario for the formation of this artifact: successive layers of human tissue formed around
some initial abnormality or trauma, occasionally accreting fibers of cotton from Price's un-
derwear that became incorporated into this artifact as this tissue hardened."

Pritchard noted "several difficulties with the hypothesis that this artifact is the body's
reaction to the foreign object that Price reported implanted in his body by aliens. Firstly,"
Pritchard continued,

there is no sign of such an alien implant; neither cutting the artifact nor examin-
ing it under a light microscope revealed any evidence that even a small portion of
it was of non-biological origin. The small amount of missing material . . . was in-
distinguishable from the immediately adjacent material which was analyzed. Fur-
thermore, this missing central section has an area only about 'A s of the area of the
period at the end of this sentence and could not be seen at a distance of several
meters as Price reported seeing the implant prior to its insertion under his skin.
Finally, if this small missing section were the actual alien implant, then the cotton
fibers stuck in the accreted outer layers of the artifact must have become attached
later on and were therefore not part of the original alien implant, failing to con-
firm the existence of the wires reported by Price. . . .

"From this perspective," Pritchard concluded, "the result of our investigation is clear:
whatever probability you initially assigned to the hypothesis that Price's artifact was of alien
manufacture must be substantially decreased." 1

Postconference Interview: David E. Pritchard, Ph.D.

233

petent, very insightful. And also, he said, several people had come up to him
after the conference and said, 'Yes, I feel that, too. I'm an experiencer and I
definitely have those same feelings.' And this woman who was here last
night also went through that whole dual-reference business of feeling she's
here on a mission, that if the child abuse of her had gotten too great, maybe
they would have taken her back or offered her that option — "

"Wait a minute!" I interrupt. "What was this about her child abuse?"

"Well, you know, there's a correlation between child sexual abuse and
experiencers," Pritchard says.

"I thought that had been disproved at the conference," I say. "I thought
we were told that child sexual abuse occurs among experiencers only to a
slightly higher degree than it occurs in the general population; and that,
therefore, that indicated the alien abduction scenario was not being used as
some sort of screen memory for child abuse itself."

"No, I don't think that's the case," Pritchard tells me. He says he thinks
I am right that this statement was made at the conference, but his impres-
sion now is that the percentage of experiencers who suffered child sexual
abuse is considerably greater than the population norm of 25 percent. He
reports a conversation he had with Joe Nyman, who said the percentage of
his experiencers who had been abused was maybe 35 percent, which, ac-
cording to Pritchard, Nyman said was "statistically within the norm." But
included within that 35 percent, Nyman told Pritchard, were the first half of
all the experiencers he had investigated, interviews carried out at a time
when he was not asking about child sexual abuse, because he was not yet
sensitive to that issue. Therefore, that first half's percentage was markedly
less than 35 percent. Among his second half of interviews, conducted when,
Nyman said, he had become more aware of child sexual abuse and was ask-
ing his subjects about it, the percentage of his respondents to the question
of whether they had suffered child sexual abuse was much higher than 35
percent. Pritchard felt this indicated there was a positive correlation.

"In any event," Pritchard continues, "in the particular case of the
woman who came to our house last night, she had had an abusive child-
hood, and the aliens sort of apologized for putting her in that family."

"They apologized to the woman?" I ask.

"Yes. And I've heard stories like that before," Pritchard tells me. "I've
heard one in which the aliens said, 'If it's really too bad for you, we'll get you
out of there.' What they meant, I don't know.

"What Joe's done," Pritchard explains, "is, he's found that by pushing
on the issue of 'Why is this entity familiar to you?' he goes back to a time
when these people feel at one with the aliens. The stories that several of the
experiencers have told is the religious myth: the idea of the alien coming

234 CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

with the soul and the little lantern-like thing, and implanting this into the
pregnant woman. This came up with the woman who was here last night —
not quite the same image, but of being present at her night of conception
and being able to describe the house and the night. That astounded her
mother, she told us, because her mother and father had only lived in that
house four months, and not when she herself had been born."
"Did she seem entirely credible to you?"

There is a pause, and then Pritchard laughs. "I don't know how to re-
spond, you know? I have such a willing suspension of disbelief. When you
talk to these people, they just blow you away! I mean, this is what I'm talk-
ing about in terms of the whole experience. It isn't: 'I saw a UFO and it was
as wide as a house and only about fifty feet in the air. And I saw windows
and aliens in it and several other people reported it.' That's a kind of objec-
tive report, and that's not what we're dealing with here. We're dealing with
people who say they met with God and feel some unity with him in the con-
text of their UFO experience."

Pritchard continues: "Well, I've always been an agnostic — sometimes,
when I was younger, unpleasantly so. But if somebody like a physics col-
league came up to me and said, 'I go to church. In fact, in these hard eco-
nomic times recently, I've gone to early-morning Mass twice this week, and
it's really helped me deal with some of this stress,' I wouldn't say to him,
'What the hell are you getting suckered into? That stuff is just a pile of su-
perstition. What's your objective reality for believing any of that stuff? Get
a good night's sleep and you'll feel better.' And so, when I talk to those ex-
periencers I feel the same agnosticism I do when I might talk to some col-
league who spoke to me about going to Mass. But all these experiencers are
telling very similar tales." ,

"That's one of the disquieting aspects of this phenomenon," I say.

"And this woman last night hasn't had any contact with any investiga-
tors. She wasn't misled by Joe Nyman, she was just sitting there and telling
him her story."

"Do you know what exposure she might have had to UFO books and
films?"

"I don't," he says. "But the striking things to me were this Dual Refer-
ence business of her childhood, and this witnessing of the embryo implan-
tation scene, which is not in any of the books or movies I know."

I guide our conversation back to how the conference had changed
Pritchard's perceptions. He refers to what he calls his "horizons broadened"
list. He repeated that he now realizes there is a lot more to the phenomenon
than the "table procedures," and that the conference has made him more
aware of how the experiences have changed the abductees' outlook on life.

Postconference Interview: David E. Pritchard, Ph.D.

235

On a more practical working level, he says, he has come to realize that
abduction-phenomenon research "is a tremendously interdisciplinary field.
We need not only more mental-health professionals, clinical and experi-
mental psychologists, and scientists — and I was very happy that the theolo-
gians were at the meeting — but what comes out of the conference is there
is not currently any physical analysis of implants, missing fetuses, trace ma-
terials that might be strongly suggestive of an alien presence or technology.
I think at the core we really need volunteers from forensic labs, radiologists,
chemists, material scientists to handle properly the small amount of evi-
dence we have on hand."

Pritchard's realization that as many as i percent of the overall popula-
tion — two and a quarter million citizens of the United States — might pos-
sibly be abductees has also broadened his horizons. He explains that he
reached that figure in four ways. First was the Roper Poll discussed at the
conference, which showed that, as Pritchard put it, "people respond posi-
tively to these somewhat ambiguous questions: 'Have you ever seen a ghost?
A UFO? Awoken paralyzed in the night?' and so on. We know experiencers
respond positively to those questions," Pritchard says, "but we don't know
if people screened out by this will have a particularly high percentage of
being found to be experiencers — except through the work of Joe Nyman,
who has gone around and asked about forty people at work and found
about three who he is certain are experiencers, and a couple more positives
who didn't want to talk to him about it anymore."

Second, Nyman's figure of three to five out of forty may be, Pritchard
feels, another indication of the percentage of the population who could be
abductees, since, as he points out, "a lot of people, when they begin to sus-
pect they might be experiencers, go through long periods of denial."

A third indication for Pritchard was the informal poll taken by the doc-
tor friend of Los Angeles-area emergency physician John Miller, who,
Miller reported at the conference, had found 3 abductee cases out of 250 pa-
tients he had interviewed in his office — "And this was a guy," Pritchard ex-
plains, "who was not particularly adept at finding the hidden ones. In other
words, as you know in this business, about one-third remember their expe-
riences consciously, a half need hypnosis to recover more than a fragment,
and there's another sixth where hypnosis adds significantly more informa-
tion. So, as a doctor interviewing patients, if you're not adept at discovering
these people, you won't find those who are in denial and who are hidden."

Pritchard's fourth indication was, he tells me, "a guy who was an expe-
riencer who drove a taxi in Washington, D.C., for four years and asked
everyone he got into a conversation with about this phenomenon. His
number for people who had seen UFOs was 10 percent, and his number for

236

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

people who thought they had been aboard was i percent, which indicates
it's an incredibly prevalent phenomenon.

"Now this actually means two things," Pritchard continues, "the good
news and the bad news. I'll give you the bad news first: it means the two
thousand cases we had represented at the conference are only the tip of the
tip of the iceberg — namely, point-one percent of that hypothetical two mil-
lion. And so you have to ask the question, 'Why did these people come
forth and not the other 99.9 percent?' Therefore you have to suspect, as
many at the conference kept shouting, that the polling samples we now have
are incredibly biased by the selection.

"On the other hand," Pritchard goes on, "it means you can go out and
find these people in the general population, because you can even go to the
Roper Poll and find the 2 percent, or whatever it was, who had four positives
to the key indicator questions and ask them. My guess is you'll find that
something like half of them are experiencers. Maybe it won't be a half, it'll be
more like a quarter; but certainly you'll find experiencers by that route."

Two percent, according to the Roper Poll, translated to 3.7 million
Americans being "probably abductees"; a quarter of that — Pritchard's con-
servative figure — would still mean more than 900,000 Americans would
qualify.

I can't help thinking Pritchard's statistical base is shaky: the inconclu-
sive, ambiguous Roper Poll; Joe Nyman's questions of his co-workers; a Cal-
ifornia doctor who didn't know what he was looking for; and a gregarious
cab driver in our nation's capital. But shaky data is precisely the problem
with this whole UFO phenomenon. I wish I knew the circumstances under
which scientist Aaron Wildowski said, "The plural of anecdote is data."

He was joking, wasn't he?

"The mental health people are in a bind," Pritchard is saying. "It wasn't
something I was really aware of until Dave Gotlib, the Toronto physician,
pointed it out: it seems the most effective therapy for these people is to not
discuss whether the experience is real or not, but for the experiencers to try
to figure out what they experienced and come to grips with it. But if you do
that as a professional therapist, you are coming very close to the line of en-
couraging the patient in his delusions. Which, of course, you are not sup-
posed to do. So how do you handle that one?"

"Very carefully, I would hope," I say.

CHAPTER IX

Postconference Interview

Richard J. Boylan, Ph.D.

A week after my conversation with Pritchard I hear from Richard J . Boylan,
the Sacramento clinical psychologist with whom I had dinner the night be-
fore the conference ended, when he discussed "off the record" what he re-
ferred to as his "six-state grand tour of reported Southwest secret sites."
Boylan's brief letter to me read:

My processing has proceeded to the point where I am prepared to be
quoted on the record, for attribution. The facts of the M.I.T. conference
and extraterrestrial contacts must get out.
The ball is in your court.

I telephone him before he can change his mind.

Boylan, who is fifty-four, graduated in 1961 from a small private college
in California with a B.A. in philosophy; in 1966, he received his first mas-
ter's degree (a M.S.Ed, in educational administration from Fordham in
New York); in 1977, he received his second (a M.S.W. from the University
of California, Berkeley); and in 1984 he received his Ph.D. (in anthropo-
logical psychology, with clinical emphasis, from the University of Califor-
nia, Davis). He has been interested in UFOs ever since he was eight years
old, in 1947, and saw the newspaper reports of Kenneth Arnold's sighting of
nine brilliant objects skimming above Mount Rainier "like a saucer would
if you skipped it over water."

By the time Boylan was a teenager, he had read every science-fiction
book in the North Hollywood Public Library, which, he told me, was "a
rather sizable collection in those days."

In 1975, when Boylan was thirty-six years old, he was hiking with a
friend in the foothills near the coast north of San Francisco when he saw a
flying disc. Boylan, at the time, was on a trail perhaps fifteen hundred feet

238 CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

above sea level. The object, he estimated, was another two thousand feet
above them, almost straight overhead.

The disc was not going very fast when Boylan first sighted it. He and
his hiking companion watched it for about thirty seconds, and then, when
they next looked up, forty-five seconds later, it was gone.

"If I were to guess, it was maybe thirty feet wide," Boylan tells me. "It
was very clearly not a manmade object: no fuselage, no wings, no tail, no
helicopter rotor, exhaust, noise, or anything else. It was going against the
wind, so it wasn't a weather balloon. You could see every foot of its external
dimensions. It was a round, dull gray, metallic object — flatfish round, not
an orb, more like a disc. My friend saw it, too. We didn't knowwhat to make
of it. It was in view a good half-minute. And I said to myself and my hik-
ing companion, 'What do you know! I bet we've just seen a flying saucer.' "

"Why are you so sure it was not a balloon?" I ask.

"Because it had occurred to me that that was one of the things the ob-
ject could be, so I checked the prevailing wind patterns and the object was
going exactly opposite to the wind. I'm very familiar with the prevailing
winds off there, and the wind at that time was blowing in from the coast,
from the west. The object was heading northwest, into the wind."

"You were on a hill," I point out. "Could there have been a thermal ris-
ing up the cliff, then arcing back?"

"No, these are very low foothills with soft contours."

"It couldn't have been the sun glinting off an intercontinental jet or a
military craft that was so far away you couldn't see?"

"It wasn't way the hell up there," Boylan says. "There's enough water
vapor in the air near the coast so a distant object's image would appear to
shimmer and blur. I knew because of the relative sharpness of the outline of
the object we were looking at that two thousand feet was a reasonable esti-
mate of its distance above us."

Two thousand feet is not all that far. At that distance, one could readily
distinguish, say, the individual wings of a biplane.

The sighting of the disc rekindled Boylan's interest in the UFO phe-
nomenon, and in 1978 he moved to the foothills of the Sierras and joined
a California MUFON branch as a consultant and part-time auxiliary in-
vestigator.

"Perhaps one thing of interest," Boylan tells me. "I was county mental
health director at that point and was familiar with the other county depart-
ment heads. The welfare head was ex-Air Force; his military assignment had
been working the deep-space radar dishes for NORAD under Cheyenne
Mountain. I interviewed him and he told me, You know, when I was work-
ing those dishes we saw stuff up there in space that wasn't ours and it wasn't

Postconference Interview: Richard J. Boylan, Ph.D. 2 3 9

the Russians', and it was going at speeds and altitudes and were sizes that
weren't either of ours's stuff. So,' he said, 'when you ask me about UFOs I've
got no argument with you, because I've seen stuff on the screens that clearly
fits that description.' This is a NORAD deep-dish officer," Boylan empha-
sizes, "telling me that while applying their best official approach to scanning
the area of space they were responsible for, they could not explain the stuff
that was showing up on their screens and had concluded among themselves
this was UFO traffic."

For the next couple of years Boylan continued to read the UFO litera-
ture and report back to MUFON what little he came across as an auxiliary
investigator (the usual sightings of strange lights at night); but more and
more his interest in UFOs was taking a backseat to his commitment to the
pursuit of a doctoral degree.

In 1986, two years after he was awarded his Ph.D., Boylan again began
to follow the UFO phenomenon, "but only," he tells me, "in a kind of
hobby way." And then, near the end of that decade, as the first of what Boy-
lan considered "somewhat scientifically respectable reports of extraterres-
trial contact" emerged, Boylan became intensely interested in UFOs again.

"There had been a growing subset of the UFO literature about aliens
landing, getting out, walking around, people spotting them, and even of
aliens coming up to people and having alleged dialogues," Boylan says.
"But, as you know, this stuff was really hard to nail down without any kind
of independent proof. Also, I'd seen enough UFO investigations to realize
that the investigators are often not the kind of people upon whose testi-
mony you would want to hang somebody. So I really didn't know what to
make of those reports, but it continued to pique my interest, because here
it was beginning to show up in my own work." Just in the course of inter-
viewing his own patients to obtain their personal histories, Boylan explains,
he learned that three of them had themselves reported extraterrestrial
contacts.

"One of the seminal events in getting somebody with some scientific
credentials behind the extraterrestrial contact phenomenon was when Dr.
Edith Fiore, a South Bay Area California clinical psychologist, put out her
book Encounters, on the number of people she had run across in her own
clinical practice who'd had extraterrestrial contacts," Boylan tells me. "Prior
to that time, Dr. Leo Sprinkle was reporting on this in his own clinical
work, too, at the University of Wyoming. Back then he had been sort of a
voice in the wilderness, without any other scientifically credentialed people
backing him up. When Dr. Fiore became the second Ph.D. psychologist re-
porting the same thing, I started to have to take it quite seriously, because
now, on the face of it, there seemed to be a basis for evidence."

240 CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

More recently, publication of David Jacobs's Secret Life further con-
vinced Boylan that he had better "wake up and pay attention to this stuff."
The result, Boylan says, was that in January 1992 he launched his own re-
search project to determine for himself whether the extraterrestrial-contact
phenomenon met his own "rigorous criteria of believability. Not that I dis-
parage Edith Fiore or Dave Jacobs or Leo Sprinkle," he adds, "but my fa-
ther was from Missouri, the Show Me state, and I guess I inherited a bit of
that. I'm one of those guys who's got to be shown.

"When I hear with my own ears, when I have the individual sitting in
front of me and I can evaluate for myself whether this person is a little loose
around the edges or not, then I feel I have a much more firsthand sense of
the credibility of the person's reporting," Boylan explains. "Plus, through a
research project, I get the chance to compare one person's anecdotes with
another's and see if there's some kind of consistency in the stories from peo-
ple who wouldn't have any basis for knowing each other. That way I can
begin to get a handle on the phenomenon."

By early July 1992, the time of our conversation, Boylan had inter-
viewed forty-one possible abductees. Boylan's subjects reported the same se-
quence of alien contact, physical paralysis, and removal to a separate craft
or locale for further examination and communication by Small Grays and
other beings that Budd Hopkins's and Dave Jacobs's abductees had. But any
further comparison between Boylan and those two investigators makes the
Sacramento psychologist flinch; Hopkins and Jacobs, Boylan feels, found
too many similarities.

"I think Hopkins and Jacobs are abduction-happy," Boylan tells me.
"What I've heard from folks doesn't always represent extraction elsewhere.
In some cases the dialogue takes place without extraction — in the bedroom,
for example, if that's the place of contact. Or there's information exchange
on site. If a person drives his car, stops, and gets out, you are not necessarily
levitated up to a spacecraft and planked out on a table. That explicitly has
not happened in a number of cases. So I think Jacobs et al. tend to oversys-
temize the experience. Nevertheless, I have found consistency — more so
than people just fancifully inventing stories could be expected to come up
with. Furthermore, I checked on whether these people have read the UFO
literature. Some have, but many of them have not, so they could not have
been contaminated by reading reports. And these individuals are relatively
clean enough that I consider the consistency from these clean sources sug-
gests the reporting of a real phenomenon with some relative inconsistencies
from case to case."

In addition to the consistency in Boylan's subjects' descriptions of the
Beings — the most frequent among them Boylan describes as "the three-and-

Postconference Interview: Richard J. Boy lan, Ph.D. 24 1

a-half-foot, gray-skinned, large-cranial, all-black-pupil no-white-showing
slant-eyed folks" — there was also Boylan's subjects' accounts of a specific in-
strument used often in personal examinations: a foot-long silver rod ap-
proximately the diameter of a pencil that is sometimes inserted into, and at
other times glided over, the subject's body. "It's apparently either some kind
of remote viewing or examining instrument with no wires attached which
presumably telemeters information back," Boylan tells me. "Very often at
one end of this rod there is a light, that end being the one inserted during
examinations. This description, down to the detail of the light at the end
and that end being inserted, has been reported to me by a number of indi-
viduals who positively don't know each other or the literature."

During those abductions that did not involve extraction, Boylan's sub-
jects were usually lifted or floated through windows that were most often
closed. While being levitated to a hovering craft, they reported, they were
able to see the landscape receding below and the stars or clouds above; in
other words, they were awake and able to view their environment from their
perspective in midair. Boylan's abductees described the intense, brilliant
light they were lifted up as being white with a bluish tint.

Boylan points out that not everybody he interviewed was 100 percent
bona fide and that some did turn out to be in his estimate "delusional or ex-
tremely loose with their perceptions." Still, he says, "the vast, vast majority,
certainly 90 percent plus, seem to be free of psychological problems that
would be such as to create the likelihood that their accounts were the pro-
duction of those problems rather than their actual experiences."

Boylan explains that if someone who had had a sighting that he or she
had truthfully reported had come to see him not because of the sighting but
because of, say, marital problems or depression, the sighting had nothing to
do with that depression, nor would it be incorporated into a system to ex-
plain the marital problems. Instead, he says, they would be "just side-by-
side events." However, the sort of psychological problem that might
account for these experiences, he said, would be found in a subject who was
a "flat-out liar. A borderline personality type. These are the kinds of folks
who are extremely fragile in their grasp of themselves and their place in the
world. They often tend to j ump on bandwagons as a way of borrowing some
sense of identity and individuality. I would look at an extreme personality
disorder who reports this stuff with great caution, because they're poor dis-
criminators of reality."

Other psychological problems might be paranoid schizophrenia or a
person with delusional disorder. "This latter is a category that is rather
tricky," Boylan explains, "because it represents an individual who has one
area of delusion and everything else in their psychological makeup registers

242 CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

as normal. They seem to talk, function, and make sense fairly well across the
whole spectrum of their lives except for one narrow, little category where
they maintain their delusional system. And if such a person were to pick ex-
traterrestrial contact as their pet delusional system, they're hard to distin-
guish from somebody who looks normal and is not delusional in reporting
contact.

"I've run across a couple of such folks," Boylan continues. "They
weren't your average broad-spectrum schizophrenics; they seem only to have
a narrow delusional system around extraterrestrial contact, and they were
tough! \ did not pick it up on the first interview in one of them, and I had
to keep talking a while until he had slipped enough to give me the clues that
this was delusional and not factual reporting."

"Dr. Boylan," I say, "if you yourself were one of these persons with just
this same sort of narrow delusional system, how would you know it?"

Boylan gives a startled laugh. "Uh . . . well . . . let's see, how would /
know? That's a tough question." He pauses for a moment, then says, "Well,
perhaps it's easier to start with someone else. I've found a couple of quali-
ties in the delusional disorder person's reporting that are different from what
I presume are the qualities of truthful reporters. The delusionals tend to
come across with some grandiosity. In a somewhat self-important way, they
will say, 'Doctor, let me sit you down and take a few minutes of your valu-
able time and tell you what the aliens told me.' They lack perspective on the
fact that this is bizarre stuff and they need to slow down and reality-test with
the person they're talking to about whether they're coming through believ-
able or not. They're consumed by the material, the information they are car-
rying, and they don't have that kind of tentative, perplexed, inquiring,
wondering, self-doubting-about-their-own-sanity quality that you tend to
get with real reporting individuals.

"Another thing is that they tend to get into areas of interpretation that
have some kind of specialness," Boylan continues. "In one person's case, the
bottom line was that it was satanic evil at work rather than extraterrestrial
visitation. They weren't really aliens, they were devils dressed as aliens, try-
ing to fool people. In another case, the delusional person was seeing himself
as the possessor of special information none of the other thousands of other
contactees presumably had, and he was doing me a favor by bending my ear
to pump his special stuff into it. The genuine contactees tend to talk about
some sense of message, but it's partial and leaves them somewhat perplexed
and anxious to compare notes with others. They have the sense that 'there's
a larger picture out there of which I don't have the whole.' With the delu-
sionals, it's 'I've got it all, folks, and let me take some of your precious time
to educate you dumb bastards.'

Postconference Interview: Richard J. Boylan, Ph.D.

243

"So, applying that criteria to myself," Boylan concludes, "you'll some-
what have to judge for yourself how I come across to you using those two
yardsticks."

Boylan's subjects range from a person who has been an experiencer since
early childhood forty years ago to someone whose experiences took place
within the last year. The passage of time, he feels, is less important to their
ability to come to grips with their experience than their individual makeup.

"Some people have unusual internal resources and can do this on their
own without professional help," Boylan says. "And some people really require
some assistance to get perspective on it and what the phenomenon means."
Boylan's assistance lies in helping these individuals gain perspective by edu-
cating them as to how widespread (and covered up) the phenomenon is. He
also comforts them that they are not alone, that other people have experi-
enced the abduction phenomenon and survived with their psyches intact.

"Oddly enough, given the unusualness of it, I don't see it as a particu-
larly hard-to-integrate phenomenon once you have the information to put
it in the proper perspective," Boylan tells me. "But if these people are not
unusually self-resourceful, or if they've been 'debriefed' by someone who's
got a point of view that would shape them to continue to perceive the ex-
perience as traumatic and violative and one that puts them at risk, then it
can be difficult."

I ask Boylan how he perceived the experience.

He thinks for a moment and tells me that he was going to make a jok-
ing reference to Christopher Columbus and the American Indians having
their first meeting, but decided that it was not such a good metaphor, given
the eventual outcome of that contact for the Indians. Instead, he says, he ba-
sically sees it as a "collision of cultures, not across an ocean but across star
systems, and often with people who only vaguely and analogously look
human. The fact that the aliens are intelligent life and communicative be-
comes quickly apparent to the contactees. And the fact that they come from
a technologically, and in many cases philosophically, superior civilization
becomes quite evident, too. As a result, there are both traumatic and uplift-
ing elements to these encounters. In most cases contactees have not in any
serious way been hurt. And once they get past the shock of dealing interra-
cially, as it were, they have often had a high-quality communication ex-
change and are left with a sense of special privilege to be among the first to
have had these kind of contacts."

By putting the phenomenon in an anthropological context, Boylan tries
to make the experience seem less bizarre. Such contacts, he explains to his
subjects, are not unprecedented; they have happened to other people and
can be interpreted simply as one race or culture meeting another.

244 CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

"My favorite metaphor," he tells me, "is the Harvard anthropologist in
a helicopter landing in the back rain forests of Brazil and getting out with
his clipboard, video camera, and boom mike and tapping some stone-age
Tupi Indian offshoot on the chest with a pencil and saying, 'Hey, whatever
the hell your name is, what do you guys eat?' "

According to Boylan, his contactees respond well to this comparison.
"It allows them to reinterpret their experience as not so much an assault
by intent as an unprecedented experience that may feel assaultive until
you can see where the Harvard anthropologist is coming from with his
agenda, and they can extrapolate that to the extraterrestrial visitors. It
takes a lot of the jumped-by-lizards highway-brigand elements out of it,
and the people settle down and really start to attend more to the message
content, the perspective changing and information exchange, which
seems to be the burden of what the extraterrestrials have in mind when
they contact. Only a minority of them seem to be mostly concerned with
body samples."

"That's not the impression you get from Dave Jacobs's book," I say.

"No, it's like the Grays are sperm-and-ovum-hungry, doing intergalac-
tic fertility-product harvesting," Boylan says. He pauses for a moment, then
adds, "Well, I don't want to psychoanalyze Dr. Jacobs, but I find the extreme
regularity in his accounts astounding. I have not run across anything like it
in either psychological or anthropological literature, and I think those are
the two literatures most relevant to this phenomenon."

I ask Boylan to move away from his contactees to his own personal ex-
traterrestrial experience.

It occurred, he explains, following his visit to the National Radio As-
tronomy Observatory's Very Large Array near Alamogordo, New Mexico.
He had left Alamogordo in his Chevy S-io Blazer at about nine o'clock the
night of April 12, he tells me, and had driven down to Las Cruces and across
to Deming on Interstate 10. At Deming, he had turned north on U.S. 180
toward the Gila National Forest, where he intended to camp for the night.
U.S. 180, a two-lane blacktop highway, cuts in a near-straight line for about
forty-five miles through high desert in the middle of nowhere.

Boylan had his CB radio on as he drove and had been talking back and
forth with truckers heading to and from Alamogordo on the interstate; but
at Deming, when he turned north on the more isolated U.S. 180, the truck
chatter died out and his radio fell silent as he had driven out of range. He
had not, however, turned off his receiver.

At about 11:20 p.m. Boylan thought he heard a voice he presumed to be
from his radio say, "Watch out for the Smokey," although he wasn't sure he
had heard the "e" sound on the end. He assumed someone was just broad-

Postconference Interview: Richard J. Boylan, Ph.D.

245

casting a warning about the presence of a Highway Patrol car, the sort of
warning he had heard earlier from the truckers; but he thought it strange
because he hadn't seen another car for miles. Boylan was, at that time, doing
something more than the legal 55 mph speed limit.

Keying his CB mike, Boylan asked, "Where's the Smokey?"

There was no answer; that was odd, too. Never before had Boylan heard
someone broadcast a Smokey alert without following it up with more de-
tails as to where the patrol car was located.

By then Boylan was maybe fifteen miles north of the Deming turnoff,
on a stretch of road that was gradually rising between some pifion forests.
Suddenly he saw, visible in the high beams of his headlights, what he pre-
sumed to be smoke on the road ahead.

"Where's the fire?" Boylan asked into his CB. "Does anybody else see
the smoke or the fire?"

Again, there was only silence; but by then Boylan had entered the cloud.

That was his last conscious memory until he emerged from the smoke
cloud's other side.

Boylan then continued on to the Gila National Forest campsite, only
faintly bothered by his encounter with the smoke. The following morning,
however, the memory of the cloud was more troubling, because he didn't
think it had been smoke and he didn't think it had been fog. And when, as
he began to dress, he noticed what appeared to be a couple of scoop marks
on the big toe of his right foot, "I began to weave things together," Boylan
tells me, "and my suspicions began to grow. Then I did a time analysis and
figured I had an hour or so of missing time. And the continued subjective
sense of strangeness coming off this trip after I had gotten back, along with
a physical kind of pineal-gland pressure behind the eyes and nose, made me
suspect there might have been more to the content of this trip than I con-
sciously remembered."

Boylan decided to have himself hypnotized to see if anything might
have happened that he was unaware of. It was through hypnosis, he tells me,
that "additional details of the vapor cloud entry and emergence came out."

As soon as Boylan had entered the cloud, he had slowed down, hung
the CB microphone back on its bracket, and put both hands on the wheel.
The smoke seemed to be floating off the hillside to his left, drifting across
the road, and continuing down to his right. As he drove deeper into the
cloud, it became so thick he could no longer distinguish the roadbed or see
its white lines; so he came to a complete stop. He did not pull off onto the
shoulder; instead, he was blocking the right lane of the road.

It was pitch dark except for the stars, and he believed he should have
been able to detect an orange glow of flames; but he could not. Nor did the

246

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

cloud have any odor, and so he was forced to conclude that whatever it was
he had driven into, it wasn't smoke.

He also knew it wasn't fog. He was in a New Mexico desert in April,
on a bone-dry night, and above the cloud the stars were out. The air was
crystal-clear; there was no moisture to make fog out of. There was no body
of water around. The road he had been driving was gradually rising, so he
wasn't in any sort of pocket where moisture could collect. And there he was
at a dead stop in the right-hand lane of a two-lane blacktop highway cross-
ing a sere desert enveloped in what, in his car's headlights, appeared to be
a grayish-white odorless cloud.

Boylan got out of his car to investigate.

Feeling somewhat disoriented, he crossed the left side of the road to the
ditch beyond which the ground gently rose to the scattered pifion trees. He
traversed the ditch and, not sure of the direction in which he was heading,
began to climb. He had gone only as far as the first trees when he stopped
to locate his bearings. When he tried to move again, he could not.

Boylan was paralyzed.

At the same time he sensed the approach of two "persons," who, taking
their places on either side of him, firmly gripped his upper arms and guided
him forward and to his left a short way to their craft.

"The funny thing about the hands," Boylan tells me, "was that the
fingers were very long and not like human fingers feel. In other words,
they didn't feel like a series of hard bones defining fingers; it was more of
a cartilaginous interior with a padded, fleshy exterior. They were gripping
me with two fingers on top, one on the bottom, which led me to deduce
I was dealing with three-fingered persons. Possibly they had an opposable
thumb that wasn't engaged, but I couldn't feel it. The fingers weren't
much wider than a normal human finger; but they were longer and quite
strong and having more of a contouring, cartilaginous feel and less of a
flat bone chink-chink-chink kind of wraparound feel that articulated
human bones do.

"I was conducted forward a ways — I can't tell you if I walked or glided,"
Boylan continues, "until we were close up to this landed metallic vehicle
shaped somewhat like, well, sort of a cross between a saucer and a dirigible."
The object was not shaped like a classic flying saucer: it was fatter than a
disc, perhaps twelve feet at its thickest; it had no cupola and was approxi-
mately thirty to forty feet in length. Boylan thought its cross-section would
look like a cigar that had been flattened on the bottom — although the de-
tails of its bottom were difficult to determine, since it was partially embed-
ded in the desert sand, as if it had crash-landed.

Postconference Interview: Richard J. Boylan, Ph.D.

247

In addition to the two Beings who guided Boylan to the object, there
was a third, who had apparently been injured in the landing. A gray-white
cloud was still escaping from the craft, and Boylan assumed that the vapor
he saw was some sort of by-product of the crash.

A doorway opened along the side of the craft, and the two Beings led
Boylan inside, placed him in a seat, and departed. It was not until he was
alone in the craft's dimly lit interior, inhaling what seemed to be the sort of
stale, recycled air one breathes on a transcontinental airline flight, that he
realized he had no idea what the Beings looked like. He had time to won-
der if, in his paralysis, they had remained out of his vision or whether at mo-
ments his eyes had been closed.

Some time later the two Beings returned, and Boylan was able to catch
a glimpse of one of them. He caught sight only of the creature's face: an oval
head; no nose to speak of; and black, inhumanly large, oval eyes. There was
not enough light to see details of its mouth. And because he was seated he
could not be sure of the Being's height. But he had the distinct impression
that it was because the Beings were concerned that he might have been
harmed by inhaling the vapor that they had brought him to their craft for
an examination.

The Beings led Boylan into the next room and placed him in what felt,
he thought, like an astronaut's chair might in a pulled-back position, so that
he was reclining but not quite flat. His ankles seemed held in place as if by
a force field, and then Boylan felt an intense pressure as though something
was being pushed far up into his nose. As soon as the object had been im-
planted, Boylan's ankles were released and he was free to go.

Boylan recalls the outside air being cooler, brisker as he was floated hor-
izontally back to his automobile. He entered the Blazer, sat there for a mo-
ment, and then he started its engine, accelerated to road speed, and emerged
from the cloud into the black, starlit night.

"It was at that point that fully conscious recall resumed," Boylan tells
me. "So everything from slowdown to speeding back up, but not quite to 55
mph, is a missing chunk from conscious memory. The details have been re-
trieved through hypnosis."

"When you entered the cloud, how far beyond your headlights could
you see?" I ask.

"My memory stops right about at entry into the cloud," he explains. "If
I'd had that much clarity of thought I would have pulled off the road as soon
as I became aware I couldn't see very far ahead."

But he hadn't. And the image of his automobile hidden within a cloud
blocking the right-hand lane for as much as one hour is a troubling one. "Is

248 CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

it inconceivable that you would abandon your car in the middle of a public
highway for that long?" I ask.

"I would never dream of doing such a thing!" Boylan says. "I consider
it one of the most dangerous things you could do. But, by the way, when I
resumed driving, it was twenty miles before I encountered another car, and
there were none behind me. It's as many people have reported: as if the high-
way had been interdicted on both sides for some ways, so there was no real
danger of being driven into — not that /knew that," he added. "But ex post
facto, it became clear that that was the situation, and for that reason it was
not a miracle that my car was not plowed into."

The excessive pressure Boylan had first felt behind the top of his nose
while seated in the craft lasted four or five days, along with something that
was almost a headache. These physical traces, too, were factors that had led
him to search through hypnosis for an answer to what had happened to him.

Boylan went to three different hypnotists. Two of them could not elicit
much detail from him, and he subsequently learned that they had had their
own encounter experiences. (This has led Boylan to hypothesize that if a
therapist is blocked himself, he may not be much good at unblocking some-
one else.) Boylan's third hypnotist, a woman, "also has remote viewing ca-
pabilities," he tells me, "and was very successful at hypnotizing me and
getting most of the details I've gotten."

"And you're confident that these details are your details and not some-
thing your hypnotist has led you into?" I ask.

"Yes," Boylan answers. "Leo Sprinkle also worked with me. Several hyp-
notists pulled little bits of details out, and these details are either congruent
or weave well. They don't contradict each other. I wanted to be careful that
she wasn't leading me. And I retained enough of my hypercritical faculty
that I was kind of watching her line of questioning while she was running
me through this. I am convinced this is my stuff and not hers."

"So what do you now think really happened to you on that road to the
Gila National Forest?" I ask.

"I think I had an encounter with some non-Earthly folks whose craft
was by the side of the road," Boylan says matter-of-factly. "They seemed
very benign and left me none the worse for wear when I got back in my car
and finished my journey."

I am silent.

"Subsequently," Boylan continues, "the other thing I got from this
trip — and I suspect from that experience — is a real sense of urgency to get
out the message about the government's secret saucer program and their
very current Star Wars agenda. I'm beginning to think this urgent agenda to
get this information out may be part of the message I got at their hands."

Postconference Interview: Richard J. Boy I an, Ph.D.

249

"Dr. Boy lan," I ask, "why do you think they showed themselves to you?"

Boylan thinks for a moment. "Well, I can't be sure about that. I think,
being in possession of the information I have, it certainly may not be a bad
pick to pump me up to get the word out. Maybe I would have done that
anyway — I don't know."

"Let me go back to that note you wrote me: 'My processing has pro-
ceeded to the point where I am prepared to be quoted on the record for at-
tribution. The facts of the MIT conference and extraterrestrial contact must
get out.' Your note suggests that sense of urgency you've already mentioned,
but what do you consider 'the facts' that must be gotten out?"

"That the phenomenon of multiple extraterrestrial contacts of a gener-
ally benign one-civilization-communicating-with-another nature is impor-
tant for us as a people to be aware of. And that we must integrate this
phenomenon into our experience. The government has no business stand-
ing in the way of that or in trying to stop that from happening — not to get
into all the unsavory methodologies they use. What is happening is an im-
portant part of our human history, and to say that somebody who would
deprive us of our history is out of line is putting it mildly!"

"Where do you think these Beings come from?" I ask. " 'Extraterres-
trial' implies from the stars, but the more I speak to people, the more I sense
the current thinking is that they come less from the stars than they do from
another dimension."

"Maybe," Boylan says. "I don't know. Maybe it's inner-dimensional.
Maybe it looks inner-dimensional because if you bend space-time you can
emerge in a spot that previously looked empty and banglyaaie. there. I sus-
pect their mastery of physics makes Einstein look like Newton. My as-
sumptions, and the messages they seem to give the contactees, are that they
are from other star systems and we're sort of the Johnny-come-latelies of in-
telligent life. And if we clean up our act nuclear-wise and ecology-wise and
in terms of international relations, maybe we'll be let into the club one of
these days."

"I have one final question," I say. "How do you think your father with
his Missouri 'Show Me' background would respond to all this you've been
telling me?"

"Well, he died when I was rather young, so this is a bit of an extrapola-
tion," Boylan said, and paused. "I think he'd run me through tight and se-
rious questions, and if I survived that as well as I seem to be doing here, I
think he'd say, 'Well, by gosh, maybe there is something to this.' "

CHAPTER X

Postconference Interview

Pat

On Wednesday, July 15, not quite a week after I spoke with Richard J. Boy-
Ian, I receive a telephone call from "Pat," the pretty, blond, midwestern ex-
periencer who reported at the conference how her dentist husband had leapt
out of bed in the middle of the night to grapple with one of the aliens. Pat
wants to tell me about her most important experience: the time she was
"pulled through the eyes of an alien."

Over the phone she explains that this incident happened four years be-
fore, while she was attending a retreat in the middle of Missouri. For four
days Pat had been participating in encounter groups and meditating —
"going inward," as she put it, "to find out who I was." On the last night of
the retreat, after the meetings ended, there was to be a dance at the main
lodge. The evening had started to get chilly and Pat decided to walk the cou-
ple hundred yards along the path through the trees back to her cabin to get
a jacket.

As she walked in the moonlight she felt a gentle breeze and heard the
leaves rustling. "I looked to my right and I knew something was there," Pat
says, "but I wasn't afraid."

She next had the sensation of entering an invisible "tunnel." The air
around her felt compressed and still, and two Small Gray Beings met her in
the tunnel and escorted her toward what appeared to be a weatherbeaten,
vertically planked wooden shed. As Pat approached the shed, however, she
realized she could see partially through it.

"What had happened was they had put up what looked like a 3-D holo-
graph," Pat tells me. "They had somehow been able to take an energy field
and stabilize it into this specific image of a shed — and don't ask me how they
do it," she adds, laughing, "but it appeared like some form of electricity sta-
tioned in space. It was quite dark, so I really couldn't see totally through it,
but I knew it was like a veil of some sort."

Postconference Interview: Pat

25 1

The two Small Grays led Pat around to the back of the shed, where, she
remembers, she looked up and saw the alien craft hovering just above her.
The next thing Pat knew, she was inside the disc.

"How did you get into it?" I ask.

Pat thinks for a moment before replying. "I think I was floated up at an
angle," she says. "My feet never touched the ground the whole time, so I can't
be sure whether there was a ramp or not, I wasn't paying attention to my feet."

Within the craft, on Pat's left, was a table with some objects on it. She is
certain the table did not hold a person. About six yards ahead of her, also to
Pat's left, were her two Small Gray escorts, and next to them several robed,
taller, square-shouldered, sandy-blond-haired, more human-looking, pre-
sumably hybrid Beings whose skin was a pale flesh color.

"Their eyes weren't bulbed and dark like a total pupil," Pat tells me.
"They weren't bulging out and almond shaped. They were more like ours,
maybe a little larger." Pat could not see their hands or feet because they were
hidden by their robes.

The Small Grays, however, didn't seem to be wearing any clothes at all.
They looked like "typical Grays," Pat tells me, "except that they were more
white." One of them was white with a slight bluish tinge; the other seemed
a bit purplish. Although Pat did not notice their hands or feet, she did no-
tice that their arms seemed entirely pliable instead of bending at an elbow:
"It was more like an octopus arm," Pat says, then adds, "without the suction
cups, of course."

Although the hybrids were looking at Pat as she stood before them, she
could not detect any expression on their faces. "If they were emotional," she
tells me, "they were loving and benevolent. I could feel that. These Beings
have progressed to where they show emotions through an energy you sense.
You know beyond a shadow of a doubt their feelings because you're feeling
them, too. When they're sad, you feel the sadness they are feeling."

The dominant figure in the room, however, was a very tall alien who, as
Pat was escorted into the craft, had stood with his back toward her. Ac-
cording to Pat, the Small Grays presented her to him and he "slowly rotated
to face me." She laughs a little self-consciously. "Most of these cases aren't
dramatic," she says, "but I want to tell you, this experience gives me goose
bumps every time I think about it. It was just very theatrical the way he
slowly turned and looked at me."

.He, too, was wearing a robe; but unlike the hybrids, this Tall Being was
wearing a hood which framed his sharply pointed chin, his thin, slitlike
mouth, and tiny bridge of a nose. The Tall Being's most striking feature, how-
ever, was his eyes: almond-shaped, huge, dominated by totally black, irisless
pupils. His dark eyes made his pale complexion seem almost chalky white.

252 CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

"The depth of those eyes was indescribable!" Pat says. "It was like look-
ing up at the sky at night: totally dark. He slowly turned and looked at me,
and his eyes engulfed my whole personality: everything I knew and remem-
bered about life, all my feelings, all the love I had for people on this earth
and my love for Earth itself. All those emotions came out, and he knew who
I was, and what I was, and then all of a sudden my body began to shake.

"Every molecule began to shake so very, very fast," she continues, "that
what happened next was like a silent explosion. My whole body just burst
into a million diff erent pieces of light!" Pat exclaims. "And I looked down
at myself and I could see that I was much larger than I thought I had been.
And I was so much brighter! \x. was like my soul had escaped my body. And
then," she says, "he pulled me through his eyes and we were free — free of all
the physics of this earth that limit us, free of the body that puts a wall
around our souls. ..."

Pat laughs a little sheepishly. "It was such a beautiful experience! Just
beautiful.'l just can't express how spiritual it was. All I can tell you is that the
human body is one poor, poor, poor piece of machinery compared to the
soul! And that's what we live in: the body. But if people could really see their
souls ..."

I ask Pat where she thinks these Beings came from.

"They never told me! I used to think about that and get anxious about
it. But then I realized they never would tell me. And after I stopped being
anxious over that question, they did tell me. The word 'owl' came to me,
and 'the Dipper.' They told me to look in the Dipper. See, a lot of this I
know I can't be making up, because I don't even know the meaning of some
of the words they use with me," Pat says, laughing. "I have to look them up.
And some of the places they tell me about, I'll get a star map or my astron-
omy book out. Well, when they told me to look in the Dipper, I started
looking through all my astronomy books and I found that there is an Owl
Nebula in the middle of the Dipper. And see, I didn't know any of that."

I ask Pat how the Beings communicate with her, and she says, "On oc-
casion, when you get into a certain state, right before you fall asleep, the
communication comes in real clear. They will just talk to me — not with me
being there with them, or them here with me; they will talk telepathically.
And I'll hear these conversations, and sometimes I'll wake up with the
memory and sometimes I won't. Other times it'll be a week later and then
it all kind of bubbles up like . . . like bubbles from the bottom of a lake?
And suddenly I'll remember, like, twenty minutes of a conversation in a tiny
split second — or at least that's the way it seems to me, sometimes.

"Telepathy is just so, so important for people to understand," Pat con-
tinues. "When telepathy is used by these ones I deal with, it's the purest

Postconference Interview: Pat

253

form of communication. I want so much to get this across to you, because
with telepathy there's no room for lies. There's no room for cheating. You
know the person, every bit of them, so you feel perfectly comfortable
around these people — I call them 'people' instead of 'aliens,' " Pat explains,
"because that is something I want to get across. I don't want nonexperi-
encers to be afraid. I'd say be cautious, but don't turn away from the expe-
rience. The point is that both Budd Hopkins and David Jacobs after the
conference said they would have to look at the other side of this peaceful
thing. And I was so elated!" Pat says. "I was so happy! Because I thought I
was just a small voice in a forest of trees and wouldn't be heard."

CHAPTER XI

Postconference Interview

John E. Mack, M.D.

The M.I.T. conference's Harvard co-chairman, John E. Mack, M.D., left
Cambridge for Czechoslovakia immediately after the last day's final presen-
tations to deliver a report on "The UFO Phenomenon: What Does It Mean
for the Expansion of Human Consciousness?" at the International Trans-
personal Association Conference, then being held in Prague. As a result, I
made arrangements to speak with him as soon as it was convenient upon his
return; by then, the M.I.T. conference had been over nearly a month.

The day before we are to meet, when I speak with Mack on the tele-
phone to get directions to his house, I express my apprehension about cer-
tain investigators' stability.

"Well, if you're attracted to these kinds of edges, you're likely to have —
what would I say? — spaces in your psyche?" Mack tells me. "It's hard to do
this work from a place of clear-cut stability. It is tempting to equate the in-
stability of the investigator with the invalidity of the phenomenon; and I've
had to struggle with that a lot myself! I ask myself, 'Does my interest in this
subject fulfill some need of mine? Is there some dimension of my own self
that has allowed me to be persuaded of something that I shouldn't be per-
suaded of?' and so forth. Then every time I go back to working with the
people themselves, I get yanked back to their seriousness, their earnestness.
They're not like people conjuring up some make-believe."

I remind Mack of his comment at the conference that the abductees
suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, but what was the source?

"We'll talk about this tomorrow," Mack says, "but if you look at the his-
tory of Western philosophy and science and at Rick Tarnas's book The Pas-
sions of the Western Mind, its central theme is the dominance and control of
nature so that we need not be terrified of it. And, of course, the outcome of
that need for dominance is a dead planet, because the only way this planet
will be totally controlled is by taking it over — which we seem to have done

Postconference Interview: John E. Mack, M.D.

255

quite a lot of already. There's the point at which that process of controlling
nature begins to overshoot, which I think is what is happening now with
this beginning encounter with the unknown that begins to challenge not
just the fact but the wisdom of control."

The destructiveness of the human need to control nature is a theme Mack
turned to in the paper he presented at the Prague conference. There he sug-
gested that the psychological forces behind this need stemmed from two di-
mensions of the human mind: dualistic thinking and materialism.

Dualistic thinking, he said in Prague, is the tendency to judge the
world in extremes: good or evil, black or white. And the specific property
of this dualistic thinking was what Mack referred to as the polarity of sep-
arateness. "We have extended our notions of separateness to such a degree
that we experience ourselves as completely divorced from nature, including
other human beings," Mack explained. "The consequence of this extreme
separation is the exploitation of nature, the treatment of Earth as a thing
which we have the right to use, and even destroy, for our purposes. We have
also separated ourselves from one another to the degree that we can com-
mit or risk genocide relatively casually. We do not include the other as part
of ourselves."

The materialist viewpoint, Mack stated, included two domains: the
material and the spiritual. "But the only reality that is truly accepted is
the reality of things we can touch, physical substance. The spirit world is
out there, subjectively felt, perhaps, but it does not really exist like physical
reality."

Mack hypothesized that it was the "helplessness before the Black Death
and other diseases, or the terror of the natural world and the need to mas-
ter and dominate it," which gave rise to the "extreme development and ex-
aggeration of dualism and materialism" philosophy in the West — "a
worldview," Mack stated, "that has become incompatible with the survival
of life on this planet."

In Prague, Mack called this worldview a "species arrogance, a monu-
mental hubris," as a result of which, he reported, "we are now faced with a
different set of circumstances, requiring a new psychology and a different
science, whose epistemology is not restricted to sensory, empirical ways of
knowing.

"We have lost our relationship to nature, including our own human na-
ture," Mack maintained, "and with it the sense of the sacred, which, almost
by definition, means a deep connection with nature, a reverence for the nat-
ural world as the highest expression of God's work." 1

256 CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

Our lost relationship with nature and our neglect of our spiritual senses
is a theme Mack would return to again and again in our talk.

Mack and I meet at his home in a suburb of Boston on Thursday, July 16. I
tell him I spoke with his conference co-chairman, Dave Pritchard, whose
most conservative estimate of the number of individuals in this country
who might be abductees was around 900,000. 1 ask Mack how many Amer-
icans he himself thinks might qualify.

Mack, like Pritchard, refers back to the different data sources Dr. John
Miller's "envelope epidemiology" presentation had included at the M.I.T.
conference and says that he doesn't have any better data than that. He does
say, however, that he thinks it is better to be conservative and to point out
that estimates vary wildly, "anywhere from low hundreds of thousands up
to three-plus million, depending upon the criteria used." But then Mack
makes the point that "one of the things that's important to keep in mind is
the psychological triggering factor here.

"I see many people who would not qualify in a poll at a certain point in
time because they would say, 'No, I am not an abductee,' " he explains.
"And then we have an interview which triggers a memory; or they see some-
thing that triggers something; or they read an article; or they hear me or
Budd Hopkins or somebody on the radio or TV, and they go, 'Oh, yeah!
That's like what happened to me. . . .' And then they recall something.
Therefore, the next time they would be polled they would move over from
the no to the yes category.

At the Prague conference Mack had stated that "as many as hundreds of
thousands and perhaps more than a million individuals in the United States
alone may have undergone these [abduction] experiences. . . ." 2 1 ask him
whether he was saying that he felt that even conservatively, as many as a cou-
ple hundred thousand Americans might be abductees.

"Yes. I mean, I don't know what to make of this statistically," Mack an-
swers. "There is a curious way in which this phenomenon tends to make a
mockery of all our linear thinking." He pauses for a moment, then explains,
"One of the things about this phenomenon that intrigues me as a psychol-
ogist and a person looking at human consciousness is that this whole phe-
nomenon has a kind of power to shatter all our epistemological categories.

"Take, for example, the question of 'Is it real or not?' Or 'Is it real in the
physical world?' And the answer, in terms of this UFO abduction phenom-
enon, is always yes and no. It ranges. Sometimes it shows up very hard-
edged in our physical world, like in this Hopkins-Linda Cortile incident,
with independent witnesses seeing the same thing. At such times it appears

Postconference Interview: John E. Mack, M.D.

257

to fulfill the objective empirical criteria of knowledge derived from direct
observation and practical experience and not theory. But at other times such
knowledge is very elusive. Sometimes there are witnesses who actually ob-
serve the person to be not present during the abduction. I have examples of
that in my own work, of an eight-year-old daughter of one of my abductee-
clients who is awoken by something that upsets her at four or five in the
morning. The child experiences that she's had something happen to herself.
She gets up and goes in to find her mother, and the mother's missing from
her room. The child's father is there. The covers on her mother's side of the
bed are turned down, but the mother's not there. The mother subsequently
told me she had had an abduction experience at that exact time that the
child discovered her missing. So it's not just out-of-body, it's out-of-house!

"At other times," Mack continues, "a person can be experiencing the en-
ergy of an abduction, the sense that the Beings are present, they're being
taken; but their body remains there and somebody sees that they're there.
Now we don't know whether the observer, the witness, might have been so-
called switched-off during that time when they observed the person being
there. So we don't know if the person is physically taken but appears to be
still there because there was a lapse of awareness on the part of the observers.
There is often this elusive quality about it." An example of this sort of ab-
duction would be the one Keith Basterfield mentioned at the conference in
which the Australian woman Maureen Puddy "fainted" while sitting in her
car in the presence of two Melbourne UFO researchers and later described
how, while apparently unconscious, she was brought inside an alien craft by
an entity who first beckoned to her from outside her car and subsequently
appeared with her inside the craft's round, windowless, doorless room.

"The physical-evidence area is filled with peril for everyone — not just
the investigators but the skeptics as well. Because from my perspective as a
psychiatrist," Mack says, "what I have to offer here is not a claim about a phe-
nomenon operating in the physical world — that is not my area. In other
words, I find the physical evidence corroborative. If somebody wakes up or
emerges from an experience with a raw cut, or a scoop mark, or a bleeding
area or bloody nose, or some physical sign, then that tends to give the phe-
nomenon some crispness for me as a person living in this pretty high attach-
ment to the physical world. But it's not the heart of my contribution, of what
I have to offer. While such evidence tends to corroborate that this is a phe-
nomenon that can show its impact in the physical world — and from the
standpoint of mainstream Western science this physical corroboration would
be where the main argument would lie — it's not the main argument for me."

"But isn't precisely this lack of hard physical evidence the main argu-
ment used to demonstrate the phenomenon's lack of credibility?" I ask.

258

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

"It might be the main argument on which somebody might want to
take me on," Mack agrees. "But at this point in my work I would be fool-
ish to enter into that argument. Because often what will happen is you'll
have the investigators who are speaking at the level of the actuality of the ex-
perience and the power of it, with some corroborative physical evidence; and
then you will get the official debunker coming in and arguing entirely on the
basis of how robust the lack of physical evidences are for UFOs in terms of
the grossest measurements of Western physical science. It's that sort of argu-
ment that totally disregards the complexity and strength of the experiential
dimension and its utter inexplicability from the standpoint of psychology
or even a psychosocial explanation. You probably heard Paul Horowitz near
the end of the conference say he wouldn't believe in UFOs until a cigarette
lighter drops from one." Mack smiles wryly and adds, "Of course the clever
answer to him would be that the aliens gave up smoking several hundred
thousand years ago, but nobody was quick enough, or bothered enough, to
make it. But it's that level of physical argument that misses the entire power
of the phenomenon."

I ask Mack if he was suggesting that the demand for hard evidence may
in fact be irrelevant.

"Not irrelevant — it's confirming, supportive, corroborative," Mack
replies. "I can't say it's irrelevant, it's important. If a Budd Hopkins, or a
David Pritchard, or someone who is studying the pathology of wounds, can
demonstrate that these wounds heal in a way that doesn't ordinarily occur in
Western medicine or healing, that's very powerful! And more power to them
to do that. And people are working on that. But that's not where my con-
tribution is. If somebody says, 'Well, how do you know that this little scar
that occurred after an abduction was from the abduction?' I can't prove that.
But it's the company that it keeps. It's the case after case after case: a' person
wakes up and says, 'I didn't have that before. That cut came afterwards.
Mack pauses for a moment, then he says, "I'll give you a case of mine. A man
wakes up from an abduction experience with a four-inch gash in his leg; it's
down to the bone. He's going to go to the doctor, but it's healed by the end
of the day — so he says. Okay, someone could say, 'Well, maybe he's lying.'
But that's my businessll've spent forty years in psychiatry; I did forensic psy-
chiatry. It's my job when somebody's putting me on, or lying, or has some
ulterior motive, or distorting. That's where I do have some expertise — in the
discrimination of mental states. There isn't any suggestion, to me, that these
are people who have some motive to distort their experience or to lie or to
self-aggrandize." Mack shrugs and says, "Now, you could say they were mis-
taken. That, you know, they mistook their own experience ..." But the ex-
pression on Mack's face indicates he thinks that option unlikely.

Postconference Interview: John E. Mack, M.D.

259

"So what has most convinced you to take this phenomenon seriously?"
I ask. "Is it — "

Mack leaps in, not waiting for me to finish my question. "Case after
case after case of, on the whole, timid people — 'timid' not necessarily by
virtue of character, but timid about reporting these experiences — who come
forward reluctantly — 'reluctantly' because they want to be truthful with
themselves about what they've been through, out of a certain integrity that
they have, and also a concern that there is something buried in their expe-
rience, the residue of which continues to bother them. And finally they get
up the nerve to come see somebody about it.

"I tend to see the ones for whom it's been harder, in some ways, to seek
help than those whom Budd sees. That may be for complex reasons having
to do with where he tends to be most in evidence," Mack explains. "Para-
doxically in this case, people are often much more willing to see nonpsy-
chiatrists than psychiatrists, because they do or don't want to be labeled
psychiatric. I see quite a few people who do want to be labeled psychiatric:
the university administrator who came to see me, for example; I mentioned
him at the conference. I listened to his story, and I listened and I listened.
He could see I was taking his story seriously, and I could see him becoming
more and more distressed that I wasn't finding him crazy. And by the end of
our session he said, 'Gee, Doc, I had hoped you would tell me I was nuts.
Now I have to deal with the fact that what happened to me was real and that
scares me. It scares me because I don't know how to deal with it. I don't
know what all this is!'

"And so what has been most powerful to me is the authenticity of the
people," Mack says, "the believability of the way they speak, the degree to
which they are isolated from one another. ..." He pauses for a moment,
then points out that the abductees' isolation from one another has dimin-
ished in the last year as more abductees have come forward in response to
increased media coverage of the phenomenon. However, he points out, the
current lessening of isolation does not take away from the fact that prior to
the expanded media attention, individuals who had not been in contact
with each other and who were unfamiliar with accounts of the phenome-
non in the media were reporting much the same specifics and details. And
it is inconceivable to Mack, he says, "that these stories have been somehow
concocted from bits and pieces of cultural flotsam and jetsam that is float-
ing around. It doesn't have that character.

"So it's the natureof these people," Mack continues. "The fact that I've
been a full-time psychiatrist for thirty-six years — and there's nothing in my
psychiatric experience that could account for what I was learning from these
people. That was the single most powerful thing for me: here were people

260 CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

otherwise quite ordinary, unremarkable, reporting with full sincerity and in
a most authentic way these extraordinary experiences which they did not
want to believe were so themselves. People with very good reality testing
who, when pressured by me, when pressed about their stories, said, 'Doc-
tor, I wish it weren't true. I'd love to be dislodged from believing this, be-
cause it shakes up everything I've ever thought.' "

So the first aspect of the phenomenon to impress John Mack, I make a
note, is the authenticity, believ ability, and nature of the abductees themselves.

"Another thing: when you get close to the heart of the experience,"
Mack is saying, "when you go deeper with them, either with or without
hypnosis, and get close to the core of the experience, you meet extremely
powerful emotional resistances. You get very intense indicators of powerful,
traumatic events. You get nightmares, psychosomatic changes, fearfulness,
mistrust, suspiciousness. They have difficulty exposing themselves to situa-
tions where it might reoccur.

"They may have phobias of hospitals or needles," Mack continues, "not
phobias like childhood fears, but phobias that are very concrete as adults of
situations that, when explored, turn out to be related to actual experiences
from the abduction phenomenon."

I remember John Carpenter the second day of the conference mention-
ing the woman who, as a very young child, had developed a phobia about
her dolls; she had thought they moved at night. As a result, she had all her
dolls destroyed. According to Carpenter, during a hypnotic regression she
recalled being with hybrid children aboard a UFO. In keeping with what
Mack had earlier said about the isolation of abductees, Carpenter's patient
had never come across any accounts or heard stories about hybrid children
prior to her own realization during hypnosis.

Mack describes the emotional intensity of the memories sometimes re-
covered by these people during hypnosis and how "when you get close to
the reliving of these experiences, they will literally scream with terror and
their whole body shakes." There is nothing, clinically, that could produce
that sort of response, he emphasizes, "except the reliving of something that
has been done to them. There is no other condition I know of that can elicit,
bring forth, that kind of emotional expression. Then that leaves me with the
question 'What was it that was done?' "

The second aspect, then, is the emotional intensity of the abductees' recall
as indicative of trauma. The presence of this intensity leads Mack to ask,
What was the trauma's source?

Mack tells of running through all the possibilities: Was it some other
kind of trauma? Was it rape? Is the patient reliving a war experience? Is there
any past history of childhood abuse? Did they suffer some terrible physical

Postconference Interview: John E. Mack, M.D.

26 1

injury when they were a child that they had suppressed? Did somebody try
to suffocate them? Did their mother or father try to kill them when they
were a baby? "You sort through all the traumas that people can suffer that
have a strong physical quality to them," Mack explains. "And not one case
that I have investigated — nor, to my knowledge, that anyone has investi-
gated, neither Budd, Dave, John Carpenter, or myself — no one has ever
come up with another trauma or set of traumas that could account for that
emotional state.

"That is the core of it," Mack said. "That and the fact that these de-
scriptions of their experiences are very consistent both sequentially and fac-
tually down to the minute detail. Not that everyone's is identical; there are
variations. The ships may differ in size, the nature of the instruments
change, the shape of the doctor's head on the vessel changes. There are other
characters they may see. But the basic structure is exceedingly robust! And it's
important to note again that this sequential structure was established in the
patients' minds before all the recent media flurries, because now, you could
argue, there's been the television show Intruders and other things that these
individuals could have been taking this structure from. But this was not true
in the 1970s and 80s when this phenomenon was first being described."

Narrative consistency, therefore, is the third aspect of the phenomenon
that has impressed John Mack.

The fourth aspect is the absence of any kind of diagnosed mental illness
that would account for it. In his "Abduction Phenomenon: A Preliminary
Report," within a section titled "Who Are the Abductees? Psychopathology
and Personality," Mack noted:

Few generalizations can be made at this time about this important ques-
tion because of the paucity of research data and the unusual nature of the
phenomenon. Several co-researchers have set the absence of gross psy-
chopathology as a precondition for their inclusion of a case in their series.
Nevertheless, none of the abductees with whom I have worked have re-
vealed obvious psychopathology, such as schizophrenic psychosis, severe
depression, or other major psychiatric disturbances, that could account for
the reported experience. Indeed, what has struck me most has been the "or-
dinariness" of the population, including in my sample, for example, a
restaurant owner, two musicians, secretaries, a writer, a prison guard, uni-
versity students, and several housewives. Several demonstrated resentment,
slight suspiciousness, a sense of victimization, and other post-traumatic
symptomology. Most seemed burdened in their lives by their abduction ex-
periences.

Some . . . report troubled relationships in childhood with one or
both parents, alcoholism in the family, and childhood or adolescent

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abuse. Several report personal isolation, troubled adult relationships, and
problems related to conceiving and bearing children and parenting. But
in other cases these disturbances are not present. In some cases, attitudes
toward sexuality and decisions relating to having or not having children
seem to be affected by the abduction history. In no case so far have I found
a way of tying the non-abduction aspects of these individuals' histories to
their abduction stories, nor have I found convincing psychodynamic links
between the specific narratives of the reported abduction experiences and
other aspects of the personal histories or emotional lives of the abductees. 3

(John Mack's Preliminary Report also contains some interesting docu-
mentation of the testing of abductees by psychologist Elizabeth Slater. Her
findings were the result of a 1983 experiment in which she administered the
WAIS-R [Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale— Revised] , BVMG [Bender
Visual Motor Gestalt], figure drawing, and Rorschach tests and the TAT
[Thematic Apperception Test] to nine individuals picked by Budd Hop-
kins. Slater was not told these persons were abductees:

"In her initial report, written before being told who the subjects were,"
Mack wrote,

Slater noted that the subjects were of above average intelligence and
demonstrated "a considerable richness of inner life." She found some to
be "eccentric" or "odd" with "spontaneity and originality in thought and
feeling." The inner richness tied to a "risk of being overwhelmed by the
urgency of their impulses." The subjects were "in a rather continual strug-
gle to bind [their impulses] and keep them at bay." "Under stressful con-
ditions," she noted, "at least six of nine showed a potential for more or less
transient psychotic experiences involving a loss of reality testing along
with confused and disordered thinking that can be bizarre, peculiar, or
very primitive and emotionally charged." She also noted a degree of iden-
tity disturbance (especially sexual identity confusion and "self-inflation"),
lowered self-esteem, relative egocentricity, and/or lack of emotional ma-
turity and minor but frequent "boundary failures" on their figure draw-
ings. One spoke specifically of "a sense of smallness and victimization in
the face of overwhelming outer forces."

Slater also observed "some degree of impairment in interpersonal rela-
tionships," "problems in intimacy" for some, and "a certain mildly paranoid
and distrusting streak in many of the subjects" together with hypervigilance,
"a marked tendency to attend and be sensitive to nuance and fine detail,"
"leeriness and caution," and a "disposition towards wariness."

After Slater was told of the nine subjects' reported UFO abductions
she reconsidered her report from that standpoint. "The first and most crit-
ical question," she noted, "is whether our subjects' reported experiences
could be accounted for strictly on the basis of psychopathology, i.e. men-

Postconference Interview: John E. Mack, M.D.

263

tal disorder. The answer is a firm no." "If the reported abductions were
confabulated fantasy productions," she wrote, "they could only have come
from pathological liars, paranoid schizophrenics and severely disturbed
and extraordinarily rare hysteroid characters subject to fugue states and/or
multiple personalities." "Not one of the subjects," she wrote, "based on
test data, falls into any of these categories." None, she said, demonstrated
"psychopathology by which they might have invented their reported ex-
periences of abduction."

Slater then considered the possible impact of the reported abduc-
tions. "Such an unexpected, random and literally other-worldly experi-
ence as UFO abduction," she suggested, "during which the individual has
absolutely no control over the outcome, constitutes a trauma of major
proportions." She noted also the denial of "opportunity for even minimal
forms of mastery" in association with the UFO experience and the "social
stigmatization" and "alienation" the victims would encounter. She con-
cluded that their interpersonal problems, damaged sense of identity and
body image difficulties, emotional turmoil and anxiety and wariness were
"the logical outcome of the invasive and injurious nature of the reported
UFO experiences." In 1991 Slater told me she had previously considered
herself to be a "reality-oriented, plodding person," but this study "ex-
tended my narrowness" and "changed my thinking around." She saw scars
from incisions in several subjects and wondered "what is this all about?" 4 )

The fifth aspect of the phenomenon that has impressed John Mack is
the presence often of present corroborative physical evidence. As Mack noted
in his Preliminary Report, "The physical features which accompany UFO
sightings and landings such as changes in physical and chemical character-
istics of the soil, are among the most interesting and compelling aspects of
the phenomenon. They provide a seemingly objective corroboration of re-
ports that are otherwise so bizarre as to defy our credulity. . . .

"Physical manifestations," he continued, "at times frighten abductees,
who do not want to believe that their experiences are real, and at other times
reassure them of their sanity." 5

These physical manifestations, we were told at the conference, might
take the form of nosebleeds, fresh cuts, or scoop marks upon returning to
consciousness following a period of missing time or upon awakening —
sometimes upside down in their beds, or on top of their covers, or in a dif-
ferent room entirely, or even outside their house. Experiencers might
sometimes be surprised to find themselves fully or partially dressed, their
clothing missing or carefully folded or, in rare cases, exchanged for someone
else's. Another common physical manifestation was one experienced by
Carol: the sudden realization, while driving, that she was miles away from
where she had been traveling just a blink of an eye before.

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CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

To Mack, the "most disturbing and elusive of all" physical manifesta-
tions are the reports of missing fetuses. But, as both he and John Miller
noted, although many fetus removals have been claimed, none have been
documented.

A sixth aspect of the phenomenon is the existence in many cases of an
association with UFOs: at the same time the individual is having his or her
abduction experience, other people in the community are observing UFOs
in the same area. These witnesses may be people the abductee is close to or
whom the abductee does not know at all. (An example of the latter would
be Linda Cortile's abduction from her twelfth-floor Manhattan apartment
into a waiting UFO, witnessed by the international diplomat and the two
security officers guarding him plus the older woman crossing the Brooklyn
Bridge.) In short, as Mack wrote in his Preliminary Report, although "many
abductions seem to occur independent of UFO sightings by the abductee
or other witnesses, a close association between UFO encounters and ab-
ductions has been consistently observed." 6

The seventh, and perhaps the most striking and inexplicable, aspect of
the phenomenon is its occurrence in very small children — some as young as
two years old — who report in the best language they know how of little men
taking them up into the sky, or sticking things in them, or "biting" their
noses. Abduction reports by small children can be of particular scientific in-
terest, Mack notes in his report, because "small children may not have been
exposed so much to media accounts or discussions within the family, or by
peers or friends."

Describing a specific case of his involving a small child, John Mack
writes:

Jill and Mike Ward have told me troubling things concerning their three-
year-old son, Ned. When Ned was 21 months old Jill went up to his room
one night and found "his blanket was all screwed up, as is typical. He was
laying on it, and so I couldn't straighten the blanket out. The next time I
went up to check on him his blanket was perfect. It was laying out over
him beautifully as if someone had smoothed it over him." Mike "does not
get up with babies . . . and my daughter can't reach into the crib."

When Ned was just two, Jill saw him talking to the alien face on the
cover of [Whitley] Strieber's Communion, kissing it and calling it "Pi." A
few months later after waking from a frightening dream, [Ned] told Jill,
"I fly in the sky ... to the spaceship." Asked who was in the spaceship, he
responded, "a man . . . little man." Six weeks later the Wards' seven-year-
old daughter came into her parents' bedroom at five a.m. to tell them that
Ned had come in to see her with a lot of blood on his face and coming out
of one nostril. They also found blood on his pillow case and a scabbed-

Postconference Interview: John E. Mack, M.D.

over incision mark on the back of his head. When Jill asked him if any-
one had been in his room Ned said, "Little man come through window.
Man bited me on the nose."

When Ned was two years and seven months old I interviewed him
with Jill. He was a lively, warm and outgoing child. I asked him to iden-
tify the cards in the Hopkins Image Recognition Test (HIRT) which con-
tains ten cards devised by Budd Hopkins to explore children's abduction
experiences. They consist of ten large black ink drawings from faces that
would be familiar to children — a boy, a girl, Santa Claus, a policeman, a
clown, Batman, a Ninja Turtle, a witch, a skeleton and a typical alien. Ned
alertly identified each card correctly and matter-of-factly. When I showed
him the alien card Ned said, "I write it on the board."

Jill said they had done "a doodle like this" together on a blackboard.

I asked if he had "ever seen this guy."

"I open door, I drive the spaceship," Ned said. He said it was "that
man's. That man's spaceship." He seemed to be getting uneasy and said, "I
have my blankie. I put my thumb in my mouth."

After talking casually about where he had seen some of the other fig-
ures, I returned to the alien card and asked, "Where did you see this guy?"
and whether or not he liked him.

"I don't like him," he said.

"What does he do?" I asked.

My assistant, who had been present, noted "up to this point Ned has
been generally talkative and attentive, giving unsolicited information.
Now he often doesn't answer at all, or only after long silences."

JM: Is he nice or is he scary?

Ned: He's scary.

JM: [Tries to calm and reassure him, then:] Does he come into your
room sometimes?

Ned: Yeah. I have a big sword, now hit him out of my room." [gets
excited as he talks about fighting.] ... I have my blankie, put my thumb
in my mouth. I were very tired.

JM: You get tired when he comes?

Ned: Yeah.

JM: And you put your thumb in your mouth?

Ned: Yeah. The guy breaks my window. I can't fix it anymore.

Ned becomes increasingly silent and edges across his chair to his
mother and sits in her lap. "A man came in my room," Ned said. "Man
has big flashlight to my eyes." After this Ned told of how "He hurt me."
("Where?") "On neck." He said, "I don't want to cry." Then he said, "I
feel better."

Ned tells Mack about how he likes to watch Star Trek and fights
against the man. "A man run after me, I run faster," he says. 7

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Soon after, the child came into Mack's lap to be comforted.

"Parents can, of course, influence their children's experience," Mack's
report noted. "Nevertheless, for a theory of the abduction phenomenon to
be complete we must find a way to account for the emotionally intense and
seemingly authentic detailed experiences of children as young as Ned whose
exposure to outside sources of information has been limited." 8

Any conventional explanation for the abduction phenomenon, Mack
tells me, would have to provide an answer for what he refers to as the "whole
package":

The authenticity, believability, and nature of the abductees

The emotional intensity of the abductees' recall as indicative of trauma

The narrative consistencies of the abductees' stories

The absence of any kind of diagnosed mental illness in the abductees

that would account for their experiences
The corroborative physical evidence
The phenomenon's close association with UFO sightings
The reports of abduction occurrences by and among very small children.

"To my knowledge nobody who is skeptical or questioning has come up
with an explanation that even begins to account for this syndrome from
some other, more conventional source," Mack explains. "I'm a little careful
where I present this and in what context. I didn't start to go public on this
until I had seen enough cases myself that I said — like you said to me —
'Something is going on!'

"Now, I'm not saying it's extraterrestrial," Mack continues. "Because,
again, I think that this has a way of making you question your categories.
'Extraterrestrial' means it exists in the physical world the way we know it; it
just doesn't happen to be from this planet — it's from another planet. It's
physically out there. And I don't know that way of structuring it in terms of
the physical world as we know it is going to help us very much.

"I'm very careful in the language I use about this," Mack says. "I can
only say it shows up in our world in very powerful, vivid, physical terms
affecting people very powerfully. But I don't know what the source of
these experiences is. I don't know where this comes from. I have no way of
knowing.

"Now, people say, 'Well, maybe it comes from some dimension beyond
space-time,' " Mack continues. "Or 'Somehow they've developed a physics
that has mastered the problem of moving around in the galaxy' — if they do,
in fact, reside on some other star in our physical galaxy as we know it. But
that's not an area I feel I can talk about. The one and only thing that I've re-

Postconference Interview: John E. Mack, M.D.

267

ally stayed with is the same thing you said, which is that my material says
that something is going on here that is affecting these people powerfully,
which I cannot account for in- the physical world that I've grown to believe
was reality. So," he says, leaning back, "this phenomenon is stretching my
notions of what's real."

I ask Mack what possible psychological disorder could adversaries
among his peers come up with that might explain any part of this phe-
nomenon.

"The psychiatrists? Well, the main argument is that somehow this syn-
drome is related to dissociation. Dissociation is a big, big thing in psychi-
atric literature. And what psychiatrists arguing this never quite come to
grips with is (a) the source of the trauma, (b) the mental content that results
from dissociation, which is nothing more than a time-honored coping
mechanism.

"Dissociation is by and large a defense device," Mack explains. "In other
words, something happens to you." He leans forward, clasping his hands to-
gether in front of his chest. "You're traumatized in some way; somebody
does something. You're overwhelmed by a rape experience or a sexual expe-
rience. And your psyche cannot tolerate the anxiety, the terror, the rage, the
overwhelming traumatic nature of this. So, rather than experience this in an
ego-shattering, fragmenting, horrible way, a split occurs. The content is put
off there someplace," he says, gesturing with right hand off to that side. "It's
dissociated.

"Part of the psyche is left to deal with the trauma: defend it, ward it off,
avoid it, repress it — whatever the particular style of the particular person's
avoidance structures are. It's over here," he says, again gesturing with his
right hand, now a fist, "leaving some of the psyche," he says, opening his left
hand in front of his body, "free to go on as best it can with its own life.

"Now this material will intrude from time to time, through nervousness,
bad dreams, difficulty in human relationships, through certain intrusive fan-
tasies, whatever," Mack continues. "But that's what dissociation is: it's a way
of coping with something that the ego cannot stand. And when you treat
people, you try to give them the strength to reopen that closed cabinet," he
says, unclenching his right fist, "and take a new look at what's there.

"Now," he says, "to go from understanding that mechanism to saying
that dissociation as a mechanism created the content of the experience is an
altogether different matter. In other words, that's a leap which goes far be-
yond attributing the phenomenon to dissociation.

"Let's again take the two parts of the psyche," Mack says, now holding
his left hand palm up in front of him, his right hand palm up to the side.

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"The part that is present," he says, his left hand rising and falling as if he
were trying to estimate the weight of an invisible object in his palm, "and
the part that is dissociated," and he makes the same gesture with his right.
"In the part that's present, you will have vague memories, fears, nightmares,
some content which will bear some symbolic, perhaps, relation to this over
here — " he glances at his right hand — "but it will not contain the full mem-
ory, because that's the effect of dissociation: to have only hints and dreams
and nervousness, anxiety, and some symptoms. You could have some body
symptoms, or phobic fears of going to hospitals if there was a trauma in a
hospital, and so on. That's the job of dissociation: to keep the trauma out
of consciousness.

"Now as you do the work and you uncover what was back here," he
says, looking again at his right palm, "what you'll get eventually is closer and
closer approximations to the actual memory of what happened, still with
some distortion. It may be that at first you'll get monsters in a dream instead
of the man who did the rape. But little by little — and the person may never
get the actual memory of what literally happened — you'll get various dis-
tortions of the trauma: somebody tried to- choke the person, or surgery as a
child, whatever it may be. But I don't know of any work on dissociation
where you get the invention of a completely false, complex, highly articu-
lated, sophisticated narrative that bears no relationship to any of the actual
experiences that led to the dissociation! 'Dissociation' is a structural term;
it's not a content term. So you'd have to add to dissociation some mecha-
nism of invention of a narrative."

After a pause to make sure I am following him, Mack continues: "Now,
abductees do demonstrate dissociative mechanisms. I mean, you can see it
happen. The fact that I need to use nonordinary states of consciousness —
hypnosis or whatever — to recover the memory by definition means that they
dissociated off. Otherwise they'd just talk to me like you and I are talking,
and they would remember everything that way. So the very fact that I have
to use a way of accessing memory, to bring them back that part of them-
selves with the memory that was warded off, means they did dissociate, but
they dissociated as a response to something that occurred! It does not address
what occurred, and that remains the mystery: What is the source of what-
ever it was that requires that they ward this off and not remember?"

I ask Mack why he thinks there is such resistance within the psychiatric
and scientific community to even the possibility that the source of the
trauma is what the abductees are saying. He momentarily deflects my ques-
tion to tell me that in the 1960s, when he began research for his Pulitzer
Prize-winning psychoanalytic biography of T. E. Lawrence, the reputation
of the charismatic Lawrence of Arabia was "somewhat of a buffoon, a

Postconference Interview: John E. Mack, M.D.

269

Rudolph Valentino, Desert Sands and flowing robes" individual. The de-
bunker mentality, Mack explained, existed about Lawrence in those days as
much as it exists today concerning the alien abduction-UFO phenomenon.

"Liddell Hart was one of T. E. Lawrence's first biographers and knew
him well," Mack continued. "Hart said you could measure almost scientif-
ically how people regarded Lawrence according to how well they knew him.
The ones that simply formed their opinion of Lawrence from the general
scuttlebutt tended to be debunking, or argued about him from the stand-
point of their own ideology: what they thought about the Middle East, or
whatever. But the closer they came to actually knowing Lawrence and his
work, the deeper their respect for him was. And Hart's observation held up.
In other words, in the ten years I was doing research on T. E. Lawrence, I
never met anyone who really knewT. E. Lawrence, who knew what he'd said
and what he'd done, who didn't think very highly of him. And the de-
bunkers were always the ones who had some political axe to grind, or had
never known him, or who had just seen the popular statements about him.

"Well," Mack says, "it's the same thing with the abduction phenome-
non. There are those who start out as atheists, nonbelievers. They reject it.
But the people who get close to it, who see the cases, who study the mate-
rials, who listen to me carefully, or hear tapes I play, or read papers I've writ-
ten, or in any way allow the material to come into them, they become
agnostics. And eventually, if they stay with it, some of them come to the
place which is really an advanced place, which is, 'I don't know what it is.
Something's going on. It's interesting. It's scary.' But they truly suspend
judgment." Mack pauses for a moment, then says, "The furthest you can go
at this point is to say there's an authentic mystery here. And that is, I think, as
far as anyone ought to go. But that's a powerful, powerful place to come to
at this point.

"Now, most of the people who really are familiar with what I'm doing
in any depth are with me on that. The ones that say 'Poor John! What's hap-
pened to John?' are like the Lawrence people — they have not studied the
material. In a funny way, I've kind of moved away from trying to persuade
the mainstream culture of the validity of this phenomenon," Mack contin-
ues. "I think it's time we grew up as a species and moved on to say 'Okay,
there's something going on here.' Let's not just debate 'Is it real? Is it not
real?' It's okay to ask 'What do you mean by real?' but let's move on to
'Something's going on here,' like you said, and look at 'What does this re-
ally mean for us?' 'What does it mean for our cosmology?' 'What does it
mean for psychiatrists clinically in terms of our categories?' 'What does it
mean for us in terms of our relationships to the ecology and to the envi-
ronmental crisis?' 'What does this mean in terms of domains of reality?'

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"Do they come from our physical reality?" Mack asks. "Or does it mean
that somehow we have to change our categories of reality? I talk to Dave
Pritchard about this all the time. Can he account for this within our space-
time physical technology? Or do we have to put that aside?" Mack pauses
for a moment, then shrugs. "There's a guy, Jack Sarfatti, out in California
who says there's some kind of black time hole they come through from be-
yond space-time," Mack said. "They've mastered travel in and out of our
space-time universe. I don't know anything about this. But we have to ask
ourselves what this phenomenon means in terms of who we are in the cos-
mos. If we are not, as in Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities, 'Masters of the
Universe,' what does this do to our perceptions of ourselves if some other
creatures can come in and, without our having any choice, overcome our
wills and do with us as they wish?"

In his Preliminary Report, Mack referred to the phenomenon as a "kind
of fourth blow to our collective egoism, following those of Copernicus,
Darwin and Freud," in that it might lead us to realize, "Not only are we not
physically at the center of the universe, transcending other life forms, and
rational members of our psyche. We are not even the preeminent or domi-
nant intelligence in the cosmos, in control of our psychological and physi-
cal existences. It appears that we can be 'invaded' or taken over, if not
literally by other creatures, then by some other form of being or conscious-
ness that seems to be able to do with us what it will for a purpose we can-
not yet fathom." 9

"What does this realization do to the species arrogance that is our hall-
mark as being the most important creatures?" Mack asks me.

I mention the briefing paper Linda Moulton Howe told me about, with
its suggestion that these Beings have been genetically engineering us for tens
of thousands of years in order that we might achieve what importance we
have achieved.

"Right," Mack says. "I don't know that we have been tinkered with, but
there is this kind of either literal interspecies breeding or some technology
and information that is being injected into our brains that makes us expe-
rience it like that. What does this mean, that we're in this relationship? If
there is this powerful connection of energies — and I won't even say 'species,'
because that presumes it's real and from a taxonomy that's like ours — but if
there is some kind of energy from some source we don't understand con-
necting with us, other beings, or other intelligence, what does this mean?
Some people experience it as purely traumatic.

"And there's another interesting dimension to this," Mack continues,
"which Budd Hopkins and Dave Jacobs and I argue about all the time,
which is that I'm struck by the fact that there seems to be a kind of match-

Postconference Interview: John E. Mack, M.D.

27 1

ing of the investigator with the experiencer. So what may be the archetypal
structure of an abduction to Dave Jacobs may not be the uniform experi-
ence of, say, Joe Nyman or John Mack or someone else. And the experi-
ences seem to pick out the investigator who will fit their experience."

"Could you have that backwards?" I ask.

"Yes," Mack says amiably.

"It seems to me that Jacobs, Hopkins, and Nyman may pull out of their
experiencers what they want to see."

"People said that of them at the conference; I can't say that," Mack re-
sponds. "I respect what they do a great deal. But the fact is, I had an expe-
rience in which twenty people were sitting around in my living room, and
there was one woman there whom Budd had brought here one night when
he was staying to do some work with her, and then she came to my support
group the next month. I invited her.

"Each person in the group was talking about what they had been
through in their own personal investigations of their experiences, the
trauma of the thing, but that they had moved to another level. They had be-
come very aware of the ego-shattering experience of having to rediscover
our place in the universe; that there's some deeper purpose to this, some
larger design, and that it doesn't really avail us or help us to think in terms
of good guys or bad guys. And they're talking this way; and, you know, I
participate in that kind of talk. And this woman who was in Budd's group
was saying, 'I don't understand this! I mean, I've been victimized and trau-
matized and you're all talking about it as though there were some redeem-
ing elements in this?' She didn't come back.

"Some of the investigators — and I'm not saying Budd or Dave," Mack
is quick to add, " — want to have it both ways: They want to treat this as a
literal phenomenon of hybridization and genetics in our physical world.
They want to treat it as literally physical: they're real and they're aliens. But
in treating this phenomenon in that manner, they're not really looking at
the shattering implications of this for the nature of our reality, or the fact
that this means we're in a relationship that has some meaning beyond this.

"In other words," Mack says, "I don't see how, on the one hand, you can
say this phenomenon shatters our notions of physical reality and then treat
it entirely literally in terms of our physical reality." Mack pauses for a mo-
ment, then adds, "This isn't just my speculations. This is what happens with
Harry, whom you saw at the conference. During regression this guy is
screaming and shaking on my bed up there — it's terrible — 'I'll killyoul Fuck
you! Get o/rae!' " Mack says, moaning and pantomiming Harry's struggles
to push the Beings away from himself. "And afterwards he'll say, 'But I'll tell
you, John, the trauma of what they do with my body — the taking of the

272 CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

sperm samples, the paralysis, all that trauma — that's not what the big ter-
ror's all about. The big terror is about the shattering of my reality view if I
acknowledge that these creatures are real!'

"Often the last thing these abductees want to do," Mack continues, "is
look in the Being's eyes. They know if they look, then they will have to ac-
knowledge the presence, because the energy connection is so intense they
can no longer deny the actuality of them. And then they have to admit
there's some force, some power, some energy, some Beings — whatever it
is! — that is completely inconsistent with the construction of reality they've
maintained. It's as if it shatters their reality.

"And I'm more and more coming to think — and this relates to your
question about the resistance in the culture — if you really face up to this
story, this is a BIG story. If this is true, if something important is really going
on here and this is not just psychological, but rather some kind of connec-
tion with energy, Beings, whatever, in the physical world outside ourselves,
or in some kind of consciousness which we've never understood which
would stretch our notions of what 'consciousness' is, then this puts a big
hole in the Western worldview.

"And you know there is nothing people are more attached to," Mack
continues, "than their view of what is real, of what exists, and how the world
is constructed. You begin to challenge that, and that is terrifying to people.
And that's why I think the resistance exists.

"Maybe this Western scientific worldview was meant to protect us
against our vulnerability to the kind of terrifying superstitions that led sev-
enteenth-century clergymen to burn witches," he says. "Or the belief in
witches themselves. Or those demons we so feared who brought us plagues,
the Black Death. Or perhaps it was merely a recognition of our helplessness
in the face of the physical world that the Western scientific/philosophical
enterprise was meant to get mastery of. So the threat embodied in any ac-
knowledgment of the possibility that this phenomenon might be true is
seen as somehow reopening us to the dangers of superstition, medieval
demons, witchcraft, and all of that. But I don't think it's that at all. I think
it's as if we've escaped into rationality with Western science. We've 'mastered
the universe.' And here we're back helpless in the face of creatures that we
can't even declare to be our imagination at this point."

"Now," I say, "can you tie this in to what you were talking to me about
on the telephone yesterday — the Western concept of controlling nature and
Rick Tarnas's The Passions of the Western Mind?"

"Yes!" he says excitedly. "I have great respect for Western science. It has
created miracles in getting rid of diseases. It has enabled us to feed people
who would otherwise be starving. It has created opportunities for us to bet-

Postconference Interview: John E. Mack, M.D.

213

ter know one another through advances in transportation, electronic com-
munication, thereby enriching our lives. We are able to stay warm and dry
at night and safe from savage animals. So the physical triumphs of science
are palpable and enlist enormous respect. They have required a certain in-
tellectual mastery over nature; and that mastery is Western science's great
achievement. But, as I've said, there is a certain species arrogance in this
dominance of nature and in the intellectual cognitive schools that have led
us to be able to do that. It is this arrogance," Mack insists, "that has put us
out of balance with nature."

"And do you see this UFO-alien abduction phenomenon as playing a
role in correcting this imbalance?" I asked.

"I'm not saying that this phenomenon is somehow intelligently created
to right that balance," Mack replies. "But it does seem to curiously operate
counter to such an arrogance in that here's a situation where, clearly, we are
not masters of nature. We are not in control. And it's very interesting that
just at a time when we seem to be on the verge of ending life as we know it
on this planet through our toxins and destruction of the rain forest and pol-
lution of the seas, that a phenomenon such as this should occur which, in a
sense, demonstrates to the direct experiencers — and indirectly to the indi-
rect experiencers — that we are not in fact in control. So," Mack concludes,
"were we to allow this phenomenon to be noticed, it does have the poten-
tial effect to shatter this kind of species arrogance."

I ask Mack the obvious question: If these Beings feel such an urgency
to halt our destruction of our planet, why don't they intercede in a way that
would be both meaningful and unequivocal?

"I'm not saying it's the Beings who sense the urgency," Mack answers.
"It may be that the whole thing has some — I don't know, it's hard to think
of it as . . ." His voice trails off.

I ask if he is suggesting the concept of the universe as a huge living or-
ganism of which the Earth is but one small part.

"It could be," Mack replies. "If you are a living organism and I am, and
the Earth, in a sense, has some kind of organismic quality, it may be that
there is some sort of divine scheme. I mean, we've so cut ourselves off from
any sense of a divine design that we wouldn't know it if it were there! Peo-
ple talk about God in church, but they don't really believe there's any divine
design. It's like with Joan of Arc: it's okay to have rules about God, as long
as you don't experience conversations directly with God. They've burned
people for that!

"Well, it's okay to mouth platitudes about God in churches," Mack
continues, "but to actually experience a robust intelligence operating with
some stake in the fate of this earth ... I mean, Thomas Berry, the progres-

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CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

sive Catholic theologian, has talked about the Earth being the finest exam-
ple of God's creation; but we're cut off from any sense of a spiritual design
or a design beyond our own material world.

"I was raised as the strictest of materialists," Mack explains. "I believed
we were kind of alone in this meaningless universe on this sometimes ver-
dant rock with these animals and vegetables around, and we were here to
make the best of it, and when we're dead, we're dead. So this phenomenon
has got me very agitated, sort of puzzled."

"But if there is a sense of urgency about the ecological disasters we are
wreaking on this planet, why," I again ask, "don't 'they' come to somebody
who can make some quick differences?"

"Well, this is an interesting question," Mack says. "I've thought a lot
about that: how, first of all, information itself is a mystery. Jacques Vallee
said he doesn't necessarily believe the abduction stories because it doesn't
make any sense that they would need to abduct that many people to do
those experiments on. But that presumes he knows what they're doing when
they do these experiments.

"We don't know what they're doing!" Mack points out. "They may be
studying energy systems of cells in ways we don't even have the slightest no-
tion how. ... It could be William Blake's line about seeing a world in a
grain of sand. I mean, we don't know what the cosmos contains in the way
of cells. We just have the grossest kinds of ways of measuring things with
electromagnetic whatevers. So we really don't have any idea what they're
doing when they monitor our brains or do these experiments with us. And
if you think about how information evolves in the universe, you realize we
really don't know much about that, either. Things evolve — we would argue
why — it's not as if God had intervened directly in the affairs of mankind.
That, again, would be a rather childlike religious view, it seems to me, be-
cause after all, nobody stopped the Holocaust, and nobody has stopped the
great famines, plagues, and terrible suffering on the planet.

"It may be that, for reasons we can't fathom, the destruction of the
Earth is not to be permitted," Mack says. "And the agency of the correction
may be ourselves. In other words, it may be our transformation that is oc-
curring here. It may not be that they are doing anything! It may be that
somehow this reality is entering our minds and souls in some way and that
it is we who are changing things or are to halt the destruction. That's what
the experiencers report is going on. This is what they come to. And these
people are not necessarily politically or philosophically sophisticated at all.
That's what's so interesting! They are very ordinary people. As one of them
said to me, 'It's like the butterflies coming back to stop the caterpillars that
are denuding the bushes.'

Postconference Interview: John E. Mack, M.D. 2 7 5

"I'm far from being able to translate this phenomenon into a global, po-
litical, or spiritual change," Mack tells me. "But just staying with it from its
closer-in, purely scientific and philosophical implications, it's very interest-
ing in terms of our notions of what exists in the cosmos. First of all, I think
our whole notion of 'us' and 'them' is all wrong anyway — the idea that 'out
there . . .' Again, it's the Western view that there's an Out There that's going
to affect us In Here rather than that there's an inner connection of our
evolving psyches and the outside world. I fall into this trap myself — this du-
alism. I think the whole notion of 'extraterrestrial' is a notion of dualistic
thinking anyway. We are extraterrestrial in a sense: our psyches are not con-
fined to Earth." Mack pauses for a moment, then adds, "Maybe it's even
wrong to ask, 'Is this outside ourselves or inside ourselves?' The very cate-
gory of outside and inside is challenged by this phenomenon. Maybe the
whole thing is the technological display of something from some other
source."

In his Preliminary Report, Mack attempted to explore some of the chal-
lenges of the extraterrestrial hypothesis: "Almost as if by a process of elimi-
nation many investigators, at least in the United States, have come to the
conclusion that UFOs are spacecraft navigated by extraterrestrials and that
these beings exist in our material reality and perform the abductions," he
wrote, then noted that "as [Thomas E.] Bullard has written, this hypothesis
'squares with shared experience better than with personal fantasy or cultural
learning. . . . Never mind the whys and wherefores, the extraterrestrial ex-
planation works. It satisfies believers with a systematic, internally rational
account of the abduction phenomenon all for the price of buying a single
premise: alien origins.' [David] Jacobs seems to be correct when he states,
'no significant body of thought has come about that presents evidence that
anything else is happening other than what the abductees have stated.'

"Yet," Mack continues,

there are problems with the extraterrestrial hypothesis as well, especially as
literally formulated. We are hard pressed to explain such phenomena as
human beings being passed through walls and doors while potential wit-
nesses are "switched off," or abductees taken on and off the craft without
people (other than other abductees) seeing them come and go. Also, it is
difficult to conceive of where the UFO occupants might reside when they
are not invading earth air space, how they could live on any of the inhos-
pitable planets in our solar system, how they could get here from distant
stars or galaxies, or why the beings are so human-like and the procedures
they perform so much like our medical/surgical procedures. Also, if these
are, literally, extraterrestrial craft and beings, why is solid information so
sparse? Further, why have we not seen better photographs of UFOs land-

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CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

ing, for instance, in populated areas, and none of the beings themselves?
Why, with the possible exception of the controversial Roswell incident do
we have no artifacts that confi rm an alien presence? And where are the hy-
brid babies being raised, or, for that matter, the crafts themselves when the
abductees are undergoing their experiences?

Any theory, then, faces virtually irreconcilable contradictions. If the
abduction phenomenon is considered from the standpoint of the psyche,
we are faced with extremely bizarre material reported sincerely by other-
wise sane people, and we cannot account thereby for the accompanying
physical manifestations. On the other hand, a literal extraterrestrial hy-
pothesis stretches our notions of the physical universe and its properties
to and beyond conventionally accepted limits of reality. Faced with this
dilemma some ufologists, especially Jacques Vallee and Karl Brunstein, are
writing of the penetration into our reality by parallel worlds, even other
universes. Vallee, for example, now states, "I believe that the UFO phe-
nomenon represents evidence for other dimensions beyond spacetime; the
UFOs may not come from ordinary space, but from a multiverse which is
all around us. . . ."

"Interestingly, the abductees, themselves, who," Mack pointed out,

are often scientifically unsophisticated and largely unfamiliar with such
writings, speak, including under hypnosis, of the sense that they have of
the penetration into their consciousness of other dimensions beyond our
familiar space/time reality. Many of the abductees I have met with have
the sense of the operation of some other intelligence beyond our own
which they feel is responsible for breeding new life forms, changing their
own consciousness and affecting basic human notions of reality. Harry,
for example, says, "When we witness their coming it is like scrim [a piece
of fabric used in a theater to create the illusion of a solid wall or backdrop] ,
or a movie screen. When they arrive you are looking at ordinary reality as
a movie screen. When they come it is like someone shines a bright light
behind the movie screen and obliterates the scene. What we perceive as
the movie screen, what we call reality, they burn through, proving its only
a construct, a version of reality." 10

I ask Mack if, regardless of whether the extraterrestrial hypothesis is
sound or not, he believes a government conspiracy exists to prevent the pub-
lic from learning more about the UFO phenomenon.

He thinks for a moment, and then he says, "My view of the government
is this: I imagine if I were a top Air Force general, say, and it's my job to pro-
tect the skies, Star Wars, whatever, and here I'm faced with a technology that
can run circles around any technology that we have — literally run circles

Postconference Interview: John E. Mack, M.D.

277

around it, move in and out of our air space, flip on and off the radar screen
(and you've seen those time-exposure films where there are eighteen zigzag-
ging streaks and in a second they're gone) and they're taking people out of
their bedrooms — if that is, in fact, literally happening, and we're totally
helpless — as this Air Force general, I've got to somehow present this infor-
mation to the President. And the President asks, 'General So-and-So, what
can we do about it?'

" 'With our present technology, sir,' I tell the President, 'there's not a
damn thing we can do about it. And what's more, they're constantly trying
to get information. What should I do?'

" 'Well, let's see,' the President says. 'Obviously we can't announce that
there are extraterrestrials in these funny craft and they go in and out of our
air space, and they're taking our people and there's nothing we can do, but
we're working on it.'You know? People would panic!' So — I'm still talking in
the role of President," Mack says — "so the President would say, 'You can't
acknowledge it as real, so we'll have to deny it.'

"As a result, the government's in a quandary," Mack says. "On the one
hand, they have to deny it, and on the other hand, they have to block peo-
ple's access to what information they do have — which is what creates the
sense of a conspiracy." Mack shrugs, then adds, "But I think it's as simple as
the way I just explained it: the government doesn't understand it any better
than you or I do; there's no protection from this, so they can't do their jobs.
And if your job is defense and you can't do anything ..."

Mack confesses he feels somewhat sympathetic to the government. "If
it were my job to protect our air space and I couldn't do it any better than
that, I wouldn't admit it, either, you know? Sometime I'd like to talk to you
about the politics of ontology and who decides what's real in a given cul-
ture. It's really a very small percentage of the population who determines
this. It's similar to when the Church took over from the pagan beliefs of Eu-
rope. Although the Church became the official religion, the people went on
believing whatever they had believed privately. It's sort of like that now: 70
to 80 percent of the people may believe in UFOs, but the scientific com-
munity says they don't exist. So they don't exist. It's assumed that that is a
response to an empirical question, but I think a lot of this is also a political
question."

"Hence the resistance?" I ask.

"Resistance has to do with the fact that a culture becomes deeply com-
mitted to a point of view, a way of seeing the world. And we've cut ourselves
off from so much of the spirit world. . . . Did I give you the Rilke quote?"

Mack passes a page over to me:

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That is at bottom the only courage that is demanded of us: to have the
courage for the most strange, the most singular and the most inexplicable
that we may encounter. That mankind has in this sense been cowardly has
done life endless harm; the experiences that are called "visions," the whole
so-called "spirit-world," death and all those things that are so closely akin
to us, have by daily parrying been so crowded out of life that the senses by
which we could have grasped them are atrophied. To say nothing of God.

— Rainer Maria Rilke"

"If you were God and you were trying to reach the Western mind,"
Mack says, "you could not reach it with anything other than that which
shows up in conventional physical reality, because we don't have the senses
to know anything else. What Rilke says there is that those senses have atro-
phied, those senses through which every people — including us before the
seventeenth century — have known spirit realities, realities beyond the ma-
terial. We've lost those senses and have paid such a price for our being 'mas-
ters of the physical universe' we've lost most of what we are, our God-given
capabilities. And it's ironic that this rather crude, harsh intrusion of the ab-
duction phenomenon into our senses is forcing certain people, the ab-
ductees, to open up to additional realities with great terror. But if they have
such terror, imagine the nonexperiencers, who, when confronted by this
phenomenon, respond 'It's nonsense!' because they have no means of relat-
ing this to their notions of reality. They don't because it doesn't fit!"

CHAPTER XII

Postconference Interview

John G. Miller, M.D.

On July 27, 1 hear from John G. Miller, the Los Angeles— area board-certified
emergency physician, whom I last spoke with out on the lawn during the
afternoon of the fourth day of the M.I.T. conference. At that time he said
that while it was clear to him that the abduction phenomenon represented
"some sort of powerful subjective experience," its "objective reality" still
wasn't clear. Now, over month later, our conversation seems to pick up
where our previous one left off. We are discussing Budd Hopkins's report
on Linda Cortile's doubly witnessed abduction from her twelfth-floor New
York apartment, and Miller expresses suspicion that that account may be
"too good to be true."

However, despite his doubts about the Cortile incident, Miller is not pre-
pared to disregard Hopkins's findings entirely: "Although Budd has his own
firmly held beliefs about what is going on, which colors his data-collection
process somewhat," Miller tells me, "I still found independently, in cases I in-
vestigated without hypnosis, the same specific complaints among patients
who, at least to my knowledge, had no prior contamination from the Hop-
kins/Jacobs line of UFO-Beings kinds of stuff."

"What sort of complaints did you find?" I ask.

"Well, for example, when I first heard from one of my patients of being
floated up out of their bed and through a solid window and then lifted up
towards a UFO, I just assumed I was hearing something that was totally
unique and probably some sort of out-of-body experience," Miller replies.
"I later found out that Hopkins had heard of this many times, and that
there are many others of my patients' specific allegations that Hopkins has
also observed.

"I guess what I'm trying to say," Miller continues, "is from case to case
my patients' complaints tend to confirm at least the sort of specific com-
plaints that Hopkins elicited and recorded, as well as some that he hasn't. In

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other words, Hopkins and I have talked about some things that are not in
his books that he's heard about and I've heard in my cases. There are these
symbols, for example, that have come up in his work that witnesses have
seen and described. I won't discuss what these symbols are, because they
haven't been published, but they aren't something a person would make up.
They are unique and unusual symbols."

The symbols Miller is referring to are a form of writing that many wit-
nesses have observed within the craft. I have seen Budd Hopkins's scrap-
book containing the various witnesses' attempts to reproduce that
"writing." I will not describe it here because of Hopkins's use of it as a form
of verification of a witness's experience. Suffice it to say it resembles no form
of writing, real or imagined, that someone fantasizing such an experience
might create.

Miller is also struck that his patients, too, report the same specific ab-
sences of food preparation facilities, sleeping quarters, bathrooms, and imag-
inative decor that other investigators reported at the conference. "Just think
what human fantasy could do with alien kitchens and bathrooms, for exam-
ple," Miller says with a little laugh. "We Americans are obsessed with
kitchens and bathrooms! My wife and I just remodeled our house and re-
placed the kitchens and bathrooms in the house and guest house at great ex-
pense. And after it was all done — it looks great, by the way — I thought back
and said to myself, Damn! We just tore out kitchens and baths that were bet-
ter than those available to 98 percent of the world's population! And yet, hell
no, it wasn't good enough for us. We had bought into this whole cultural ob-
session that the kitchen has to look like something out of Good Housekeep-
ing. And yet you find this obsession absent from these abductees' stories.

"To me," Miller continues, "the absences of things such as that are at
least as important as what is present: How many fingers do the Beings have?
Do they have fingernails or not? It's like looking at an X-ray: many times
you look for what's not there rather than what is. It's a trick that radiologists
and every physician has to learn a little of. And in evaluating this phenom-
enon, although I know this seems a little odd, you're looking for what's not
there, too. So if you think about it, if these stories are the products of human
imagination, why don't we have these extravagant kitchens and bathrooms,
for example?" Miller laughs softly again. "Think how wonderfully bizarre
fantasized alien kitchens and bathrooms could be!"

"And what they could tell us about the Beings' anatomies," I add. "I
mean, since they don't appear to have genitals, there wouldn't be much of a
need for standard urinals."

"You know, in my paper on alien medical procedures, I mentioned that
their examinations really shortchange the cardiopulmonary system, which

Postconference Interview: John G. Miller, M.D.

28 1

is central to Western patients, certainly Americans," Miller says. "If, as a
physician, you see anyone for any sort of complaint that has an internal-
medicine flavor to it, if you don't pro forma listen to their heart and lungs
with a stethoscope — even though you know it's not likely to be contribu-
tory — the patients will perceive they weren't examined at all. And yet, as I
said at the conference, when you hear these stories of alien exams, the car-
diopulmonary examination is of very low conspicuousness, if present at all.
I was kind of shocked by how different the human and alleged alien exam-
inations are; and yet, I also think there are some similarities."

Miller pauses for a moment, then adds, "I don't think I emphasized that
well enough in my paper."

Miller mentions the parallels between taking skin samples and how ex-
amining a patient's fingernails might show indications of a disease. "The
whole phenomenon is so bizarre, isn't it?" he says. "Mysteries exist. I guess
that's the bottom line: Mysteries do exist!"

CHAPTER XIII

Postconference Interview

Carol and Alice at Their Horse Farm

In late October, I drive down to Maryland to speak with Carol and Alice
again. During the four months that have passed since I saw them in Boston,
Carol has had three "vivid dream" episodes (one of which she apparently
shared with Alice) and two alleged alien UFO abductions, occurring one
right after the other around Labor Day weekend. Further, she is now able
to recall a mysterious earlier UFO sighting and encounter, and has discov-
ered that her four-year-old granddaughter has had another presumably
alien-related experience.

Alice is tending the horses when I arrive, so I sit with Carol at the farm-
house's dining-room table. It was from that table two years earlier, in Sep-
tember 1990, that Carol and Alice and Alice's sister Grace first saw the
triangle of three strange, brilliant white lights in the nighttime sky and be-
lieved they were witnessing UFOs.

The second incident took place fifteen months later, on December 15,
1991. That was the episode in which Carol, returning at about 8:30 p.m. from
visiting her parents in Hagerstown, again saw three bright lights, now in a
horizontal line visible through the tops of some trees. Carol stopped, got out
of the car, and walked forward for a better look. The next thing she recalled
was being five miles away making the turn into the horse farm's driveway. She
arrived at the farm nauseous, disoriented, frightened, and missing time.
When Alice's sister came to comfort her, she discovered that Carol's earlobes
were swollen and bleeding and that her earrings had been put in backwards.

The previously unrecalled sighting and encounter, Carol tells me that af-
ternoon in Maryland, took place on December 10, 1991, just five days before
the episode with the earrings. For eight months Carol had had no memory
of it. But then, six weeks after the conference at M.I.T., Carol was driving
Alice and UFO researcher Richard Hall back from Frederick on Interstate 70
toward the farm when suddenly, inexplicably, she turned off onto the Hoods

Postconference Interview: Carol and Alice

283

Mill Road exit ramp, put on the brakes, and brought the car to a stop. Hall
was in the passenger seat next to Carol; Alice was seated in the back.

"Why'd you pull off here?" Alice asked Carol. "It's the next exit we al-
ways take."

Carol didn't answer. She was sitting as if in a trance, her hands still grip-
ping the steering wheel.

"Carol!" Alice said, a little louder. "What are you doing?"

Still dazed, Carol put the car in gear and slowly pulled back onto the
road. As she was continuing up the ramp, she became aware of Alice shout-
ing in her ear, "WHERE ARE YOU GOING, CAROL? WHERE ARE
YOU GOING?"

" What? I'm going to Hoods Mill!" Carol responded. And then she
thought for a moment. I'm going to Hoods Aft//.'' Why am I going to Hoods
Mill? she asked herself. She snapped out of it and drove without further in-
cident back to the farm.

Later, both Carol and Alice had the same idea: they wanted to return to
Hoods Mill to see if that would trigger a recollection of what that episode
had been all about.

Alice drove; Carol gave her directions. At the top of the Hoods Mill
ramp Carol thought she remembered having made a right turn off the exit
at dusk one afternoon and then a left at the next road she had come to. She
told Alice to do the same. This second road, she recalled, had seemed nar-
row and overgrown; and what had started out as gravel gave way to dirt.
Soon, driving the same road in daylight with Alice, Carol recalled that after
passing a brick house on the dirt road she had rounded a curve and her
headlights had illuminated a mailbox supported by a welded chain. "It
should be just around this corner," Carol told Alice.

Alice made the turn and the mailbox was there.

"And past this," Carol said, "we make a left turn onto another dirt
road."

Carol wasn't sure if the road she had turned onto on that previous half-
remembered journey had been someone's driveway or not. She recalled only
having driven a couple hundred yards further on to where an opening in the
thick brush was used by farm vehicles for access to the fields. Alice and
Carol found the opening and turned in. Directly in front of them was a field
of tall corn. To the left was a long, narrow, faded-barn-red, vertically sided
outbuilding, its tin roof brown with rust. Behind it, a tall white silo rose like
a rocket on its launcher amid the corn. And to the left of the shed stood a
dilapidated, open, one-story cattle shed.

Returning to the site that afternoon with Alice, Carol was surprised to
see the outbuilding; in her memory she had thought it someone's house.

284 CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

And there had not been any corn in the field then; instead, there had been
what Carol later believed was a giant UFO.

What follows is a reconstruction of what happened the night she had
that encounter. It is based on Carol's conscious recall, flashbacks, and a
hypnotic-regression session, directed by Budd Hopkins in New York, I at-
tend a month after my Maryland visit.

Late afternoon, December 10, 1991: Carol was returning from a visit to her
parents in Hagerstown when, instead of taking the Sykesville Road exit off
Interstate 70, as she usually did, she felt compelled to take the exit just be-
fore it.

A moment later, half angry with herself and half anxious, Carol realized
she was lost. She knew only that she had never been on this road before and
that she was going in exactly the wrong direction. It was dusk, and she could
see the lights of an occasional house set back from the narrow blacktop road,
some open fields; and then she passed a larger house with lights that bor-
dered its driveway all the way from where it entered the road up to the
garage. It looked to Carol like an airport runway.

There was a gravel road to her left and she took it, thinking she could
find a place to pull off and back around. All she would then have to do was
drive back to the narrow blacktop road, turn right, go back to the interstate
interchange, and from there home to the farm. But when, after turning
around, she reached the blacktop road again, instead of turning right she
turned left. "Damn!" Carol said aloud. "What am I doing?"

There was another road ahead, Carol saw, and she decided to turn
around there instead. She turned onto this road, the car bouncing from the
bumps and ruts. She was becoming increasingly apprehensive. The road did
not appear to have been recently used; both sides were covered with a dense
growth. It was now only one lane wide, and narrowing; grass grew between
the two tracks. What kind of road is this? Carol asked herself.

There were no more houses, no driveways to pull into. She leaned for-
ward, peering deeper into the gathering gloom. Ahead, through the brush
and trees, she saw a glow. There's a house up there, Carol thought. Got a lot
of lights on it . . . out in the middle of nowhere! Weird!

As Carol approached the lighted area, she slowed the car to a crawl.
Whatever the source of the light was, it was partially obscured by the silo
Carol could now see off to the side of the road. It's huge! she thought won-
deringly. What is it? It looks like a big building or something. The huge
structure's exterior skin glowed like an enormous light bulb, illuminating
the field beyond the object, even the hills farther back. And now Carol saw

Postconference Interview: Carol and Alice

285

that there was a second, smaller, fish-shaped object suspended in midair off
to the large object's right side; it was gently bobbing up and down as if
rocked by a breeze. This smaller object gave off" no light. It appeared to be
charcoal-colored, made of a dull, unpolished metal. As Carol looked at it,
first its nose would rise up and then its tail. Nose. Tail. Nose. Tail. Carol
couldn't understand how this smaller object could be just floating in midair.

And then she saw there were people silhouetted by the larger structure's
bright light. They were clustered together close to the right side of the glow-
ing object as if transfixed, maybe a half-dozen of them in all. There was a
man in a denim jacket and jeans holding a child by its hand; he was clasp-
ing a second, younger child against his chest. Next to him was a woman,
and there were several other men standing nearby. It was difficult to tell
from their silhouettes how old the other men were; they could have been
adolescents.

Except for one man in a baseball cap off to the right of the group, all of
them were looking at the huge, brilliantly glowing structure. The man in
the baseball cap was facing the others. Carol wondered why he wasn't look-
ing at the strange, lighted object, too.

The people seemed not to have noticed Carol's arrival. She considered
calling to them, attracting their attention.

She wondered if the large glowing object was some sort of piece of ma-
chinery — a big, industrial, manufacturing-plant type of thing — and that
maybe these people, for one reason or another, were working with it. But
then she could see that the object was resting on a heavy landing gear; two
metallic-looking retractible braces appeared to have come down from cavi-
ties beneath the thing, whatever it was, and locked into place. And there
were windows visible at that end of the object which projected beyond the
silo. The windows were recessed from their tops so that if someone was
standing behind them he could look down. But there wasn't anybody stand-
ing behind them. If there had been, Carol thought, she would have seen
them, because the light behind the windows was even brighter than the ob-
jects' glowing surface.

It was some sort of building. It had to be. Carol was sure of that now.

The structure was at least two stories tall, flat on its top and sides, and
oblong-shaped, like a cigar. She could see that it stretched back beyond the
silo to the rear. Suddenly Carol thought maybe it wasn't such a good idea to
let the people notice her. She was frightened that she might have stumbled
upon some sort of secret thing. She didn't think she was supposed to be see-
ing this.

And now she noticed how warm she was. It was uncomfortably hot in
the light. Cautiously she began to back away from her car, out of the light.

286

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

She kept moving backwards until she could hear the crunch of the dirt road
beneath her feet.

Behind the outbuilding there was a low, flat cattle shed. Carol decided
to sneak into the shed for a closer look. As soon as she had climbed over the
gate, crossed the corral, and was under the shed's eaves out of the light, it
was cooler. There were feed stalls with chicken wire closing them off. The
light from the glowing object was so bright that where it shone through
missing boards or holes in the shed's planking it threw dark shadows of
chicken-wire pattern on the dirt floor. She crept closer to the wall on the
other side of which the brilliant object rested. She could see through a crack
one of the enormous braces it was resting on. What is this thing? she
thought. Looks like a great big . . . banana. A giant tube . . . Got a rim
around it. Like a platform or something . . . Can't see in the windows. Lots
of light in there.

A humming, throbbing sound began to fill the cattle shed until the noise
was painfully loud. Get out! Carol told herself. Get away from that noise!

Carol hurriedly backed out of the cattle shed. She climbed over the gate
and crossed the road to the opposite bank, where she could squat hidden by
bushes and small trees and watch.

From where she crouched Carol could still see the top of the structure.
While she watched, a light came on toward the end of the object farthest
from the silo. The light began to pulse. Its intensity seemed to follow the
same throbbing sequence as the sound coming from behind the cattle shed.
The light began to blink faster and faster, flicker brighter and brighter, and
the throbbing noise grew louder and steadier, until, it seemed to Carol, the
light was a brilliant, constant strobe white and the sound a loud, unwaver-
ing hum. She covered her eyes with her hands to keep out the light — and
then, suddenly, the light was gone. The noise was gone. Carol opened her
eyes and the object, too, had disappeared.

I must be going crazy! Carol thought. What was that thing? Nothing
that big moves that fast!

Now Carol was beginning to realize that what she had been looking at
had not been a building after all. But if it wasn't a building, what could it
have been?

Carol emerged from her hiding place and stepped out onto the road.
But there was nothing there. The people, too, had disappeared. Frightened,
Carol climbed back into her car and hurried home.

Later, at the hypnotic regression session I attend in Budd Hopkins's
Canal Street studio in New York, Budd remarks to Carol while she is still
under hypnosis, "It's sort of a surprise that the thing left and you don't re-
member seeing it leave."

Postconference Interview: Carol and Alice

287

"Well, I didn't see it go!" Carol insists.

"It was a big thing. ..." Budd says questioningly.

"I was covering my eyes," Carol explains, "but I didn't have them that
covered. It couldn't have gone that fast."

"Here's what I'm going to do, Carol. In just a minute I'm going to wake
you up," Budd says gently. "But before I do that, I want you to know that
whatever memories were connected with how that thing left, or where the
people went, or why it was so warm, or what caused the humming — all
those things are pieces of memory still inside your mind, in your uncon-
scious. And when you want them to come out, and it's time for them to
come out, youll remember if you saw the thing leave. You must have seen it
leave," Budd insists, "because it was there, and you were there, and then all
of a sudden you're still there and it's not. So you must have seen it leave. You
must know more about it than you've remembered so far.

"So, whenever you want to remember that," Budd continues, "whether
it's tonight, or tomorrow, or the next few days, weeks, or whatever, when it's
time for you to remember, you'll allow those memories to come back, and
youll make sense of all this which so far doesn't make much sense."

That regression session takes place near the end of November 1992; after
that, no further memories of this incident surface. Nor does Carol come up
with any answer to why she was "called" to that place.

On Saturday, September 5, at the start of Labor Day weekend, seven weeks
before I visit Carol and Alice in Maryland, Carol had another incident in
which she seemed to have been "called" to a specific place. When I speak
with her in Maryland, she has already dealt with this experience through an
earlier hypnosis session with Budd Hopkins. Its significance, she tells me, is
that it was "the first memory that I had after hypnosis of being on board. Of
being levitated up and dropped back down."

This account, too, is a compilation of Carol's conscious and retrieved
memories:

The episode began on a misty, drizzly, dark afternoon some time around
two. Carol had been on her way to spend the weekend with her parents. She
would leave her parents' house on Labor Day, Monday, and spend that night
camping by herself in a log cabin across the border in a West Virginia state
park. Alice was planning to join her at the cabin the following day.

"I would normally go straight down to Sykesville Road to Interstate 70
and head up to Hagerstown that way," Carol tells me as we sit at the
dining-room table, "but that Saturday afternoon I turned right onto Route
26. And then I turned left onto a gravel road and I went maybe fifteen yards.

288

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

I stopped just to the right of the road without going into the ditch, got out
of the car, and I saw ahead of me the little figure of someone. It was very
foggy. I have yet to remember or to actually see that figure," Carol contin-
ued. "I don't want to, I guess."

"Could it have been a Small Gray?" I ask.

"Yes, I thought he was," Carol says. "But when Budd asked me to focus
on him, I couldn't do it. I don't think I was ready at that point to do that.
It was sort of like I would then have had to accept that something had re-
ally happened. And it seemed to be a sort of holdout."

I ask, "Could seeing this figure have been the result of your car's head-
lights projecting your shadow ahead of you on the fog?"

"I didn't have the headlights on," Carol answers. "I had on the parking
lights."

When Carol got out of her car, the figure was standing on the off side
of the ditch next to the fence, and she started walking in his direction. Sud-
denly, when she had approached within several yards of him, they both
began to float upwards together at about a thirty-degree angle into the air,
with the Being in front of her. As they rose, they were both tilted forward
enough that Carol, looking straight ahead, was in fact peering down
through the fog at the tops of the trees bordering the road. The rate of as-
cent was fast enough to make Carol nauseous. She tried to close her eyes but
couldn't; she couldn't even blink.

Her arms and legs hung down limply. They felt heavy, as if they were
being dragged up by her torso. She did retain some movement of her head,
she discovered, and to keep herself from feeling vertiginous, she bent her
head backwards as far as she could and rolled her eyes upwards. That's
when she saw an object huge and very dark overhead, "like a black cloud,"
she tells me.

"Was it like a cloud, or was it a cloud?" I ask.

"I don't think it was a cloud, because I didn't notice it until we were
close enough for me to see this dark thing and we just went up into it. It was
enormous, maybe one hundred feet across. And it felt solid. There weren't
any lights. There was no beam of light atop of me that I could tell. No shad-
ows. We went up through this black opening, and the floor just sort of
closed. There wasn't any door. There was no sign that there had ever been
anything there like a door or something. So if there was a cloud, whatever I
was on now was inside this cloud. It was just black, and because it was so
foggy and misty I couldn't detect any sharp edges."

Inside the craft, Carol was still floating in the air, but at least she was
vertical. And then an invisible force pivoted her around so that she was fac-
ing in the opposite direction.

Postconference Interview: Carol and Alice

289

The Small Gray was gone, and now she was alone across from what she
assumed was some sort of wall, which gave off a very bright white light. But
the light was diffused, as if it were shining through gauze.

Floating about ten inches off the floor directly in front of Carol, like a
fancy room divider between herself and the wall, was a five-foot-high, three-
foot-wide, matte-looking charcoal-gray block. The top of the block was
level with the top of Carol's head. On the floor, just in front of the block,
there was a plate with a raised symbol on it. To Carol, the symbol looked
like the tracings of some sort of heart monitor or brain waves. There was
nothing else to see in the room but the floor plate, the floating block, and
the wall.

Carol still felt sick to her stomach, but now she was also feeling cold,
terribly cold.

The next thing Carol knew she was being moved forward until her
chest was touching the charcoal-gray block and she was floating directly
over the plate in the floor. The moment her body touched the block, the
block dipped down slightly, then tilted up in such a way that it scooped
Carol onto it.

The block, like the room she was in, was icy cold. She was lying face-
down, she told me, her right eye, cheekbone, and corner of her mouth
squashed uncomfortably upon the block's frigid surface. And since she could
not move, there was no way for her to make herself more comfortable.

"Were you still dressed?" I ask.

"Yes," she says, "but I wasn't alone anymore. The first thing I noticed
was a figure standing to my left, sort of toward the head of this table thing.
There was another figure near him. Gray skintight uniforms, everything
monotone. I didn't see any decorations, belt buckles, sign of rank. There was
just this usual gray crap. I couldn't see their faces because, suddenly, this
silvery-white stuff came down over me."

A metallic-colored material had floated down over Carol, covering her
like a sheet from her head to her feet. Except, she knew, it wasn't a sheet, it
had descended much more gradually, more airily than it would have had it
been cloth. And then, bit by bit, the material began to mold itself to Carol's
body. For a moment she panicked. She thought she was going to suffocate,
that she was being entombed in this icy material as it tightened over the
back of her head, the left side of her face, her arms, her back and legs, her
hands and feet.

She had no idea what the material was; she couldn't see it; but it seemed
almost alive, spongy-soft. She could feel it still slowly constricting about her
form. And then, suddenly, she was flipped over so that the material was be-
neath her and the "table" directly overhead. Carol had only a moment to re-

290 CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

alize she was being supported by the material before the matte-gray block
shot upwards and disappeared into the ceiling. It retreated too fast even for
Carol to see where it went. She couldn't look straight up anyway; the mate-
rial, where it had come down over her, still covered half her face.

Carol had been on her stomach on the block when the material had en-
robed her, her hands palms-up at her sides. Now that she was on her back,
her palms were down, covered by the material. The Being who had been on
her left was now on her right. He was, from what Carol could see of him, a
Tall Gray: he had a very long, thin face with a pointed chin and what would
have been high, broad cheekbones if, in fact, his body had had bones. His
large, black, oval eyes were nonreflective, with no visible pupils. He moved
closer to her and somehow made the material rotate Carol's right hand
palm-up so that her thumb was extended and exposed. He was holding
what looked like a double-barreled syringe. Carol subsequently came to
think of this Tall Gray as a "Doctor Being."

"A needle came out of each cylinder," Carol told me. "And each cylin-
der was fed by a tube. There was some sort of yellow-gold liquid in the
syringes and he injected it into me here on my thumb."

Carol holds her hand out to me. The faint mark of a double puncture
wound is still visible in the meat of her right thumb.

"The holes are scarring up now," she says. "But he injected all of this
yellow-gold fluid through those needles into my thumb and it hurt like hell!
I couldn't speak, but in my head I was thinking, It hurts! It hurts! Why are
you doing this? STOP doing this!

The needles were short, V-shaped, only about a third of an inch long.
Carol could feel the initial prick of the needle's point; the tearing apart of
the skin so that the wider portion of the needle could enter; then a fierce
burning sensation as the fluid was pushed in. Everything about the proce-
dure hurt, and Carol remembers tears trickling down the bridge of her nose.

This doesn't hurt, the Tall Gray told her telepathically.

It does hurt! Carol responded in her mind.

This does not hurt, the Doctor Being repeated. I've never hurt you.

It hurts! she protested again. Take the hurt away any way you have to do
it. just make it stop.

The Tall Gray put his hand on Carol's forehead and repeated, This does
not hurt. And the pain was gone.

Carol realized it was power of suggestion, but she didn't care.

Is that better? the Doctor Being asked Carol. How do you feel?

Til feel better when I leave.

Carol sensed the needles being removed, but she could not see where
the syringes were taken. The Tall Being leaned forward over her, close

Postconference Interview: Carol and Alice

29 1

enough to make her uncomfortable. He seemed to be studying her, and
then, suddenly, she heard him tell her she could go.

"It was sort of like, 'You're dismissed now,' " Carol tells me. "It was al-
most unexpected."

I ask Carol, "When the Tall Being was giving you that injection and
said, 'I've never hurt you,' did you feel you had seen him before?"

"Oh, yes," she said matter-of-factly.

"You recognized him?"

"It's not so much that you recognize him as there's the feeling that
you've been in other situations with the same Being," she explains. "The Tall
Grays don't look any different. They don't have characteristic features; one
doesn't have a longer nose or larger mouth than another. It isn't something
you see; it's something you feel. And I felt I should know him."

"When he touched your head, what did his hand look like?" I ask.

"Boneless, prehensile-like. He had four fingers, no thumbs. His head
was broader than it was high, but the face was very long. A real long chin.
The mouth literally a slit. I've never seen their mouths move, ever. And the
head is set on this tiny little neck! I don't know how they keep their heads
on. He was much taller than a Small Gray. I'm five-ten and he came up to
my chin. Unlike the Tall Grays, the Small Grays have three fingers like lit-
tle sausages attached to this long, thin hand like a bone. And they're little.
Their shape is somewhat different. Their faces are a bit rounder. Some have
pointed chins; some don't. They have rounded chins — "

We are interrupted by Alice coming back with one of their horse barn
boarders. Neither Alice nor Carol wants anyone to know about their abduc-
tion experiences. They never talk about them when anyone else is around.

Later, when Carol can resume her story, she tells me that after the Doc-
tor Being gave her the injections and told her she could go, the material that
had been moulded to her body loosened. It seemed to tilt down and then
she felt the material roll up beneath her and, like a bather bobbing in an
ocean wave, she was pushed out until she was again standing — floating, re-
ally — upright just above the floor.

By then the Small Gray had reappeared and placed himself in front of
Carol.

"Do you think he was your initial escort?" I ask her. "The one who had
met you on the road?"

"I guess so," she says, then laughs, "but they all look alike to me. He just
got in front of me and we started moving."

"What does this movement feel like?" I ask.

"You don't feel yourself moving. You don't realize it," she says. "There's
no vertigo. It's not like when you go up to or down from one of their craft.

292 CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

It's like being on roller skates, like your entire body is in a pocket and the
whole pocket is moved, so you don't feel the passage of air or anything else."

"Is it like one of those airport moving walkways?"

"No, because the walkways are moving under you and you have to ad-
just your body's balance to keep from falling backwards. This doesn't hap-
pen here. You wouldn't feel you were moving at all except that you're passing
from one place to another."

"Where did the Small Gray lead you?"

"To that spot in the floor," Carol replies.

And then, suddenly, the floor disappeared beneath her and Carol was
standing by herself over an open hole three hundred feet in the air and she
began to slowly fall. The tops of the trees seemed to be gradually floating up
to meet her. She was dropped back onto the road close to where she had
been taken from; but either because she was weak or because she hadn't used
her muscles in some time, her knees buckled when she landed, and she col-
lapsed backwards onto the wet gravel. Carol sat there in the middle of the
road for a moment; then she pushed herself back up to her feet, walked to
her car, and, without any memory of the abduction she had just experi-
enced, continued on to her parents' Hagerstown house.

Carol would not have been suspicious that anything strange had hap-
pened to herself at all but for the fact that when she arrived in Hagerstown
the seat of her blue jeans was wet. And just after she sat down with her par-
ents at the dining-room table and glanced up at the kitchen clock, she
asked if the clock was right. Carol's father gave her a quizzical look and said,
"Yes, why?"

"It just seems later than it ought to be," Carol said. "I must have left
late." At the time she still thought that was the reason; what else could ex-
plain the missing hour and a half of time?

But then her mother took Carol's hand, rolled it over, and, looking at
it, asked, "What happened to your thumb?"

Carol looked down at the wound on her thumb for the first time; she
had not noticed it before.

"There were two very large holes open in the middle like punctures in
the fleshy part of my thumb below the joint," Carol tells me. "And around
each one of the holes there was a white, puffy rim. It looked like a snake
bite. There wasn't any blood; it wasn't sore. It didn't bother me at all. But I
had no idea where the holes had come from. So I told my mother things just
happen on a farm, that I did things to myself all the time, and since it didn't
hurt that I was probably okay.

"But my parents insisted on putting some medication on it: first-aid
cream, a Band- Aid. And my father kept asking me if there was something

Postconference Interview: Carol and Alice

293

wrong — had anything happened? But since at the time I didn't know of
anything, I said no, that I was just tired."

Carol was not particularly hungry, either. She tried to eat some dinner
and about an hour afterwards broke out in a rash that covered her from her
knees to the top of her head. She looked as if she had chicken pox, but she
knew she didn't because she had had it as a child. It wasn't a poison ivy rash,
either; she didn't itch, and she hadn't gotten poison ivy in years. She didn't
feel bad; the rash was just there.

Carol's father wanted her to see a doctor; but because it was Labor Day
weekend Carol knew a doctor would be difficult to find.

Twenty-four hours later, by Sunday evening, the rash was gone.

Monday morning, Carol and her parents decided to leave ahead of time
in two cars for the West Virginia state park so that they could have an early
dinner together in the lodge. They arrived at the park around three-thirty, but
discovered dinner would not be served for another hour and a half. Carol's
parents did not want to wait around that long and so they made sandwiches
out of some of Carol's supplies and ate them at a picnic table by the lodge. Af-
terwards, Carol picked up the key to her log cabin, and her parents followed
her up the hill in their car to the cabin she had reserved so they could help her
unload the food and camping equipment she had brought for her stay.

In addition to a double bed, the cabin's single room was furnished with
a desk and chair, a dresser, a small kitchen area, and a drop-leaf table with
two more chairs. The table had been placed in front of the hearth of the
massive stone fireplace that dominated the room. A door in that corner of
the cabin led to a small shedlike bathroom with its toilet, shower, and sink.
There was no reason to believe that Carol — and upon her arrival the fol-
lowing day, Alice — would be anything but very comfortable in it. And yet,
as soon as Carol and her parents approached the cabin carrying their first
load, Carol's mother refused to go inside. It was only after considerable ca-
joling that Carol was able to persuade her mother to enter the one room;
and once there, her mother refused to stay alone. She told Carol she was
afraid. "This is not a good place," Carol's mother said. "There is something
bad here."

Such a comment was out of character; Carol's mother was very practi-
cal. And yet here she was terrified to remain alone anywhere near that cabin
while her daughter and husband walked the ten yards down the path to
where Carol's car was parked to pick up another load.

Father and daughter were finally able to convince Carol's mother to sit
in one of the front-porch rockers. From that chair Carol's mother could see
husband and daughter at all times. And although Carol's mother didn't
want to remain alone, she acquiesced. But the moment the last supplies had

294 CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

been brought in from the car, Carol's mother rose and said she wanted to
leave. "I want to get out of here!" she insisted. "And that's it! I'm ready to
go, and you, Carol, you should leave, too. I don't think you ought to stay
here by yourself."

"I won't be by myself," Carol told her mother. "Alice will be here with
me tomorrow. And besides, I like this cabin. I don't have any bad feelings
about this place at all!"

"Carol, come with me a moment," her father called to her from the side
of the cabin. "We need to find a scrap of wood to shim up the refrigerator."

The shim, Carol knew, was just an excuse to get her alone. And once
she and her father were out of her mother's hearing, Carol's father said that
he, too, would rather Carol didn't stay in that cabin by herself overnight.

"But why?" Carol asked.

"Because there is something wrong with this place," her father said. "I
don't want you here. Not in this particular cabin. The holiday is over. Every
other cabin is vacant. We can find you another one."

"I don't want another cabin," Carol told him. "I like this one."

Carol's father knew better than to try to change his daughter's mind. He
and Carol's mother left immediately thereafter, and Carol tried to put their
uneasiness about the cabin out of mind. But her father's apprehension dis-
turbed Carol more than her mother's. Carol's father, too, had had some
strange experiences. That second night of the M.I.T. conference Carol, as
part of the abductee panel, reported the mysterious 1954 stalled-station-
wagon/missing-time episode she had shared with him as a child while en
route to his business meeting in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. And there had
been, she knew, other odd experiences as well.

Carol's father's earliest experience had occurred in 1930, when he was twelve
years old. He had gone down to the beach with his older brother to skip
stones in the surf. They had been playing together for less than an hour when
Carol's father bent over to pick up a particularly interesting seashell. When
he had straightened up, everything about him was hazy and his brother was
gone. Carol's father wandered the beach looking for his older brother for
what had seemed to him only a few moments, then turned to look behind
him. His older brother was there. He was there and equally frightened and
upset, because he, also, had bent down to pick up a shell, and when he had
straightened up, Carol's father suddenly seemed to have disappeared, too.

Neither of the boys would have thought much about this incident had
it not been for the fact that when they returned home, instead of having
been absent a little more than an hour as they had thought, they learned

Postconference Interview: Carol and Alice

295

they had been gone three times that long. What's more, when they hadn't
gotten back on time, their mother had called the police, who had thor-
oughly searched the beach the boys had been playing on and reported back
they were nowhere to be seen.

According to Carol, her father's second experience occurred in 1932,
when he was fourteen, again in the company of his brother. The two boys
had been on a hiking trip with friends when, around two-thirty, they all de-
cided to race to the top of the mountain pass. In order to beat the others,
Carol's father and his brother chose a side path through the woods they
thought only they knew about. That path should have brought them to the
top in about a half-hour: by three o'clock. But when the two boys reached
the top of the pass it was dark, somewhere around eight-thirty. Their friends
had all reached the top hours before and had been out searching for them
through the woods, calling for them. The brothers had not heard or seen the
others. Carol's father has no idea how they reached the top of the pass in the
dark, or what had taken them so long. Neither he nor his brother ever had
any memory of what happened during that missing time.

The third incident was the disappearance of Carol's grandfather in 1939.
"My father was a young man then," Carol tells me that afternoon in Mary-
land. "He was not married yet. He and his older brother and sister were
home for some kind of holiday dinner and right in the middle of the din-
ner, while they were all sitting at the table, my grandfather pushed back his
chair and said, 'I'm going to get a pack of cigarettes.'

"Everybody just stared at him," Carol explains. "First of all, he didn't
smoke. So everyone was thinking, What's going on here? Why's he doing
this? Then they thought he was up to something funny, that maybe he had
a surprise of some kind. But it was the middle of dinner! And he looked
kind of dazed when he stood up. Anyway, he left, got into his car, drove
away — and no one ever saw him again!"

I asked Carol, "Is there any reason to think he might just have been fed
up with his family and his life and decided to go out on his own?"

"No!" Carol says firmly. "He was a concert violinist. He probably had
twenty-five students. He was a very dedicated musician; had been all his life.
He was honored in the community; he seemed to have been quite a good
father. That was the last time my father saw his father. His car was later
found parked in front of the grocery store in town, but no evidence was ever
discovered of where he went. He had essentially vanished, and he was de-
clared legally dead eight or nine years later."

"Did your father sense there were any problems in your grandparents'
marriage?" I ask.

"No."

296 CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

"He never witnessed any arguments or scenes?"

"Not that he knows about," Carol replies. "He said his parents proba-
bly weren't any different from any other couple at that time in terms of the
man ruling the roost. But my father said he wasn't a bully; he didn't seem to
be a domineering or inconsiderate husband. My grandfather seemed gen-
uinely very fond of my grandmother. They spent a lot of time together.
They had a ritual where they would sit together out on the porch every
night and talk about what had happened during the day. He did not drink
and, as I said, he did not smoke. As far as I know, he did not carouse. It was
a very small community!

"He was busy all the time," Carol continues. "But he did have long
spells where he would disappear for two or three hours and come back very
upset, very tired. So there were periods where he was missing, but my father
doesn't seem to know the details of much of that — or he doesn't remember,
because it happened when my father was very young."

If, as was suggested at the M.I.T. conference, the abduction phenome-
non is generational, then perhaps both Carol's father and her grandfather
were abductees, too. This, of course, leads to concerns about Carol's son and
granddaughter.

Back at the conference, as part of the abductee panel Sunday night,
Carol showed the Magic Marker picture of the "flying machine" her four-
year-old granddaughter, Stacy, had drawn, which included Stacy's sketch of
Nu, the little Gray Being who sometimes took her up in the craft. Carol had
also told us that Stacy hadn't wanted Carol to say anything about Nu to her
parents. "Mommy and Daddy don't like him," Stacy had said. "And when I
put my drawings of Nu on my wall, Daddy takes them down."

In the middle of August, about ten weeks before my trip to the horse
farm, Carol, visiting her granddaughter, saw Stacy playing with an imagi-
nary ball about the size of a soccer ball. Carol says she asked the child if the
ball was invisible.

"Sort of," Stacy answered. And then, according to Carol, the child ex-
plained it was "like a ball, but made out of light," that the ball "could make
doors and windows open and close, and holes in solid walls big enough for
her to walk through," and that these holes "would close up after she and the
ball went through them."

Carol asked Stacy who had given her the ball to play with. The child
glanced uneasily at her mother, seemingly hesitant to say anything about it in
front of her, so Carol did not press. The following afternoon, however, when
they were alone, Carol again asked her granddaughter where the ball had
come from. According to Carol, Stacy said some of Nu's friends had given it
to her, but that she could only play with it when Nu's friends were around.

Postconference Interview: Carol and Alice

297

(I do not learn about Carol's son's — Stacy's father's — childhood experi-
ences until Carol mentions them after the hypnotic-regression session a
month later at Budd Hopkins's studio.)

That first evening at the West Virginia state park, Carol's parents drove off,
leaving her alone in her cabin high up the hill, at around five-thirty; it was
still light out. Carol built herself a fire, more to get rid of the humidity in
the cabin than because she was cold. She tried to eat something but still
didn't have much of an appetite. She sat out on the porch and drank a cou-
ple of cups of coffee while watching the moon rise; then she went to bed
around ten-thirty and slept soundly. In other words, despite her parents'
concerns, Carol had no problems that first night alone in the cabin.

The following morning, the Tuesday after Labor Day, Carol awoke
around seven-thirty, lounged in bed for a while, then arose and dressed.
Carol doesn't wear a brassiere, so she simply pulled on her long-sleeved yel-
low T-shirt, white cotton panties, blue jeans, and a pair of comfortable
shoes. She had eaten practically nothing for the past twenty-four hours but
still was not hungry. She made herself a pot of coffee and carried her cup
out to the rocker on the front porch to wait for Alice's arrival.

It was a bright, cloud-free, late-summer day. She had scarcely sat down
when she was startled by the appearance of a strange, huge, yellow insect.
The bug, whatever it was, had two buzzing wings spanning about six inches
and an oval, three-inch-long body covered by plush, golden, beelike fur —
except, unlike a bee's coat, there were no dark stripes. The insect's eyes were
at the front of its head beneath its two antennae. It had suddenly come
around the side of the cabin to the porch and hovered, buzzing, directly in
front of and very close to Carol's face. It scared the daylights out of her. It
remained there but a moment; then, in a swift, darting motion, moved to
the side of Carol's face and hovered there. It then darted to the opposite side
of Carol's face and hovered; switched to the back of her head and hovered;
and returned in front of her again.

The insect always hovered buzzing directly facing Carol and very close
to her head, but it never touched her. Then it would fly away for a few mo-
ments and come back. By nine o'clock that morning, Carol had grown com-
fortable enough with her insect companion to nickname it "Goldie." She
never did discover what kind of insect it was. But because she had never seen
one like it before, Carol assumed Goldie must have been blown in by a
storm.

Goldie- was not the only wildlife Carol saw that morning while she sat
waiting for Alice to appear. Because the park was virtually empty except for

298 CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

herself and the occasional passing park ranger, Carol was able to see deer
and bobcats, too.

Carol had expected Alice to drive out after feeding the horses and arrive
around noon. Alice would spend the night and then, because of her job in
Washington, leave early the next morning. But when, by three o'clock that
Tuesday afternoon, Alice still had not appeared, Carol was growing restless.

The skies were darkening as thick storm clouds moved in. There was a
deep growl of thunder in the distance. Carol now suspected Alice would not
be coming, that some problem had arisen with the horses or the farm; but
Carol didn't dare go down to the lodge to telephone, because Alice might
choose that moment to arrive and would have no idea where to find her.

Carol decided to take a short walk on the park road that fed all the cab-
ins. That way she would be within hearing distance of any car that came up.
Her cabin, she confirmed, was the only one occupied. She did not stay out
long. The thunder was coming closer, and when it started to rain, Carol
went back to her porch to wait out the storm.

It poured steadily for about an hour while Carol sat in the rocker and
watched. And afterwards, when the rain let up, there was ground fog.

Another cabin was situated on the slope of the hill several hundred feet
above and to the right of Carol's. It was on the other side of the one-way
park road that looped around the cabin area. From where Carol was sitting,
she had been able to look through the side of her porch up that slope and
see that cabin and any cars that came along the road. But a fog cloud had
settled very low to the ground. It was so dense Carol could no longer make
out the road or the neighboring cabin.

As Carol watched, the fog began to drift slowly down the hill toward
her. Something about the cloud alarmed her. There was no swirling of the
mist; it never quite touched the ground; and it didn't seem to change shape
at all. It just came closer and closer. Carol rose from the rocker and stood at
the side of the porch to watch the cloud more closely. It was now about
four-thirty in the afternoon; the storm had passed, so the light was good.
Therefore, the moment two thin, short gray legs became clearly visible at
the bottom of the cloud, Carol panicked and ran inside the cabin.

Her first thought was to lock the Beings out; but then Carol realized,
That's stupid! You can't "lock" them out! Instead she grabbed her car keys
from the hook behind the cabin's front door and raced outside. Her plan
was to get into her car and drive away. It didn't matter to her whether her
idea made any sense or not; she just wanted to do something. She couldn't
just sit back and allow them to take her.

Keys in hand, Carol leaped off the porch and ran down the path to-
wards her car. She managed a quick glance over her shoulder and saw there

Postconference Interview: Carol and Alice

299

were now two Beings for sure and, she thought, maybe a third emerging
from the mist.

Three Small Grays were now floating down the hill at Carol single-file.
There was no movement of their arms or legs. They were slowly gliding
down, like skiers: knees and ankles locked.

Carol, at a dead run, made it to the bottom of the path and the gravel
pull-off where her car was parked, its nose practically butting up against her
cabins neatly stacked firewood supply. She hurried to the driver's side, slid
in, and jammed the key in the ignition. The car started immediately. She
gunned the motor once and looked up.

The three Small Grays were now in front of her, between the woodpile
and her car, only a few feet away. For an instant she considered putting the
car's automatic transmission into drive and running over them; but then she
thought, No, get away! Get out of here!

She shifted into reverse and, in a spray of gravel, backed out onto the
one-lane road down to the lodge. Just as she reached the road she glanced
back at the Small Grays again. The one in front had raised his arm and was
pointing at the front end of Carol's car. She had but a moment to think, Oh,
crap!, before she heard a snapping sound and her car popped out of gear.

She was still coasting backwards onto the park road, so Carol put her
foot on the brake as she struggled to get the car back into reverse. The shift
lever slid through the gears as if through butter; it met with no resistance of
any kind. She didn't know what to do. Without gears she could not move
the car forward or backward. Her car was stalled in the middle of the park
road; she could not drive her car at all.

Carol looked back through the windshield at the Grays. The one in
front was raising his arm again, and Carol lifted her hands from the steer-
ing wheel. Please don't do anything more to the car, she thought. She had just
put 650 dollars' worth of repairs into her car the week before.

"I'm getting out," she said aloud to the Beings. "I'll come with you if
you don't hurt my car."

She left the car in the road and pocketed her keys. "I won't resist or run
away," she told them, "but I've got to remember this abduction. Please, this
is one I need to remember."

The next thing Carol recalls is following a Small Gray back up the path,
the other two behind her. She was not walking; both Carol and the Beings
were floating. And then, suddenly, she was inside their ship.

She does not remember whether she entered the fog bank, or how she
was brought inside the craft; she remembers only that the space she was in
was like the insides of a marshmallow — except it wasn't soft. Still, the white,
curved interior wall was rounded and seamless; there were no corners or

300

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

sharp edges, no windows or doors. A bright, misty white light flowed evenly
across the interior's smooth surfaces, but Carol could not see where it was
coming from.

The three Small Grays floated Carol to a reclining chair and seated her
in it. As the chair accepted her weight, it molded itself to her form. The
chair, Carol realized, would have been extremely comfortable had its sur-
faces not been so cold.

Carol strained to look about her. She wanted to see everything, but the
only part of her body she could move was her eyes; she could not move her
head at all. There was nothing to look at except that blank, curving, seam-
less wall. The three Small Grays had moved out of Carol's line of sight and
she was all alone — until three Tall Grays appeared at her right.

They all had large, black, nonreflective oval eyes that seemed covered by
a film. Carol could not make out any pupils or change in coloration. She
wondered if the film was some sort of goggle or protective covering. The
light was so bright she could have used a pair of dark glasses herself.

One of the Tall Grays approached Carol until he was standing close
enough to touch her. The other two remained standing a yard or so behind
him to her right. She did not feel particularly frightened. She was at that
point where she was resigned to letting them do whatever they wanted. Go
ahead, she was thinking, I don't care what you do because I'm going to re-
member every single bit of it.

As the Tall Gray leaned over Carol, looking down at her, and she looked
back up at him, she had the feeling that she was supposed to know who he
was; that she was supposed to respond to him in some way. It was like a little
itch in the back of her mind saying to her, You're supposed to do something
here. But at the same time she was thinking, I don't want to. I don't want to.

Later, she realized she was supposed to have recognized him from the
previous abduction, the one that had taken place on Saturday, just three
days before. He was the Doctor Being who had given her the injections. But
at this time she still had no recall of Saturday's abduction. She had no con-
scious memories of anything the "Doctor" had ever done to her, so she had
no idea who he was. Instead she was thinking, Who are you guys? What the
hell is going on here? Why am I here?

That was when, in her head, she heard the Tall Gray say, You will be
changed.

What?! Carol exclaimed.

We have to do these things. It's important that we do these things, the Doc-
tor Being said. I'm going to explain this to you. You will understand.

No, I don't understand! Carol thought. Why do you have to do these things?
Because it's important.

Postconference Interview: Carol and Alice

301

Why is it important? Carol asked.

You don't need to know, the Doctor Being replied.

"The Beings just don't tell you anything," Carol explains to me that af-
ternoon in Maryland. "They answer questions with more questions, or their
answers don't relate in any way to your questions, or they refuse to answer
you at all.

"It's a form of arrogance," she continues. "As if they were saying, 'You're
a tool of some kind for some purpose. We're going to use that tool. And
when we're through with it, we'll put it away, or throw it away, or whatever.
We don't have to explain to the tool why we're using it.' It's a very arrogant
response to all the questions, worries, and concerns you have when you're
confronted with all this strangeness.

"Your feelings make no difference to them whatsoever," Carol says. "Al-
though they sometimes do strange things, like putting their hands on your
forehead to ease your pain and then asking Are you feeling better now?' But
it's like some sort of taped response. It's not because they're concerned; it's
because in order to deal with this social animal, us, they have to get our co-
operation at some point without a lot of resistance. So they pretend to care."

The Doctor Being would not answer Carol's questions. She learned
from him only that they had to do some things and that it was important.
And then he turned back toward the other two Tall Grays — Carol came to
think of them as "Techs," as in 'Technicians" — and nodded once. One of
the Techs immediately came forward. He was carrying a single-cylinder
tube-fed syringe out of which projected a long, thin needle. Because Carol
could move only her eyes, she could not see where the tube emerging from
the top of the syringe led.

Carol's outstretched arms were resting palms-up on the arms of the re-
clining chair. The Doctor Being moved back as the Tech floated up against
the right side of Carol's chair. He pushed up the sleeves of her yellow T-shirt
and injected a rust-colored fluid into her upper right arm just beneath her
smallpox vaccination scar. He then disappeared behind her and reappeared
on her left side carrying a different, double-cylindered, double-needled,
double-tube-fed syringe.

The fluid in one tube was golden, the other yellow. The needles, she
later tells me, were longer and thinner than the ones the Doctor Being had
used on her the Saturday before. And although Carol felt a prick as the nee-
dles entered and a stinging sensation when the fluids were injected, the shot
was nowhere near as painful as the one given her with the wide double nee-
dles in the meat of her thumb. By comparison, she says, she hardly felt the
injections in her upper arms. But she could see the liquids coursing through
the tubes, and the injection seemed to go on and on and on.

302 CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

After this second injection the Tech momentarily disappeared again and
reappeared back on her right side carrying a third syringe.

Oh, no! Oh, God! Carol thought. Somewhere in the back of her mind
she recognized this syringe: it was the big, double-barreled one with the
thick needles. The Tech carefully lined up the syringe's twin needles over the
previous punctures in her thumb. The injection was less painful than Carol
thought it would be. The holes were already there; the needles had only to
break through the thin scabs. Still, it hurt, and she told them so.

No, it doesn't, the Doctor Being said.

The Tech completed his job, moved out of view, then returned with the
second Tech.

May we remove your clothes? x.h.e.y asked.

What? Carol asked, surprised. No! No, I don't think so! I don't want you
to. It's cold!

They paid no attention to her.

The chair Carol was sitting in gently pitched her forward and the Techs,
one on each side of her, reached behind Carol and pulled her shirt over her
head. They then removed her white canvas shoes. Next came her blue jeans.
She could feel their fingers undoing the jeans' button fly, and then their
hands at its waistband. She could feel the fingers of the Tech on her right
side against her flesh because he had mistakenly grasped the waistband of
her underpants along with her jeans. Perhaps because Carol's body temper-
ature was warmer, the Being's fingers seemed cool. But it wasn't their tem-
perature that surprised her; it was their texture: like leather strips rubbing
against skin.

The Tech realized his error and, like the Tech on Carol's left side, seized
only the waist of her jeans. Together the two Tall Grays tugged her blue
jeans over her hips and off. It was when the Techs removed her underpants
that Carol got mad. You can't do this! she thought.

Yes, we can, the Doctor Being replied.

She was angry, embarrassed to be naked before the Beings, and she was
cold. By this time one of the Techs had returned with a fourth syringe. It
had only one large cylinder, but there were two long, thick, vicious-looking
needles spaced about three-quarters of an inch apart. The Tech leaned for-
ward and plunged both needles into Carol's stomach just at the bottom rim
of her belly button and began injecting a reddish-orange fluid into her ab-
domen. The pain was continuous and so intense she was screaming inside
her head, THIS HURTS! THIS HURTS! And she could hear the Doctor
Being saying, This does not hurt.

It does! Carol sent back. THIS HURTS!

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303

The Doctor Being placed his fingertips on Carol's forehead and the pain
was gone. Carol's gratitude and relief was so immediate and profound she
knew she would do whatever he asked if it meant keeping that pain away.

It wasn't supposed to hurt, the Tall Gray Doctor told her. // shouldn't
have hurt.

Well, it did, Carol replied.

I've never hurt you before, the Doctor Being said.

It was at that moment that Carol realized that she had probably known
this Tall Gray a long time. Her understanding of this was not on any con-
scious level. She still did not yet, for example, recall her abduction of three
days before, or any of her previous abductions. She knew only that an on-
going, extended relationship existed between this Tall Gray Doctor Being
and herself.

The Tech was removing the needles from her navel. Although there was
no pain, she could feel the pull of the needles coming out. And then there
was the nausea — not from the injections, Carol thinks, but as an aftermath
of the pain.

Now we have to test you, the Doctor Being said. He and the two Tall Gray
Techs left Carol alone in the chair. She remained there naked, her legs slightly
apart, wondering why she was no longer cold. She tried to move her head to
look around, but she was still paralyzed; the only muscles she could move were
those of her eyes and, if she really concentrated and struggled, her eyelids.

The Beings were gone long enough for Carol to think she might even
have dozed off. But then the Doctor Being returned with one of the Techs,
who was carrying yet another syringe. Although this syringe, like the oth-
ers, had a single cylinder and a tube leading Carol could not see where, it
appeared to have some sort of small cup or funnel device instead of a nee-
dle, and the cylinder was empty.

The Doctor Being stood at Carol's right shoulder as the Tech, standing
at Carol's right side, leaned across her and took her left arm. It was the first
time she had seen his hands. His fingers were wrapped around the syringe
like a vine, and Carol was too amazed to worry what he might do to her.
She was thinking, Wow! They don't have any bones! There are no joints!

The Tech placed the cup end of the syringe against the big vein on the
inside of Carol's left arm and applied a slight pressure. She felt the prick of
a needle as it broke through her skin. But something went wrong. She ex-
perienced a burning sensation and the cup fell off and the syringe seemed
to pop up in front of her face. She could see the needle with her blood on
it. And then the Doctor Being moved into her line of sight and she saw him
look at the Tech, and instantly the Tech was against the far wall. He seemed

304

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

to have been flung back by the Doctor's eyes. But it had all happened so fast
Carol wasn't sure she had even witnessed it.

The other Tech came forward with a replacement syringe. He pressed it
on top of Carol's vein, there was a slight phfut! and she could see her blood
filling the syringe, then flowing up through the tube. Only a small sample
was taken, and then the needle was withdrawn and the blood specimen car-
ried away.

When the Doctor came back to Carol she asked him, Why did you take
my blood?

We have to, the Being responded telepathically.
Why do you have to? Carol asked.
It's not important that you know.

It IS important that I know! Carol told him. You took my blood!
The Being looked at her, then said, We have to see if everything's okay.
Why do you have to see? Carol asked. What needs to be okay? What are you
doing to me?

Why do you need to know? the Doctor Being demanded with what Carol
sensed was a bit of frustration. Why do you need to know these things? You
don't need to know this!

What do you need my blood for? Carol asked. What were all those other
shots? What are you doing — ?

The Being cut Carol off. You will be changed, he told her. You are
changing.

Carol did not understand what he was talking about. What do you
mean, 'changing'? she asked. What will I be changed into?
You are changed, the Being said.

CHANGED TO WHAT? Carol thought more forcefully.
The Being repeated, You are changed!

Carol was convinced she didn't understand him. She wasn't surprised
that she wasn't getting an answer, but she didn't know what he was talking
about. And suddenly the Doctor Being said, You will only eat cow things.

Laughing inside, Carol thought, Now I know I'm not understanding
what he's saying to me!

Hearing that, the Being repeated, You will only eat cow things!

Human beings cannot eat just cow, Carol protested. She was not nor-
mally even a red-meat eater; she preferred chicken. We have to have other
things in our diet. We cannot subsist on just cow!

You can, the Being answered. You are changed.

"It was a there-isn't-any-room-for-argument remark," Carol tells me at
the dining table of the horse farm. "When the Beings make a strong remark,
or they're being adamant, you hear it differently. It's like you don't hear in-

Postconference Interview: Carol and Alice

305

dividual words so much as you hear everything all at once. That's why I
thought I was misinterpreting what he was saying to me."

"So you don't get a 'sentence,' you get the idea?"

"Yes, you get the gist of it. So I figured I was just misunderstanding him.
But when there's no room for argument, when they don't want to hear any
more, or when they're beginning to get that little edge to their demeanor, it
comes out sharp in your head. It doesn't show on them, because they have
no facial expressions, but it comes out in your head as though there are lit-
tle exclamation points on things. And so his last comment, that I must eat
cow because I was changed, came out very strong. And I knew it wouldn't
do me any good to argue. I decided instead to ask him about the horses."

"What horses?" I ask Carol.

A month before, Carol had had a dream so vivid and detailed, she says, she
wasn't sure it hadn't been real. And when her memories of the dream didn't
dissipate with time, she decided to write them down.

According to Carol, she does not recall how in her dream she arrived in-
side the alien craft, but once inside she was brought naked to a chair simi-
lar to the one she occupied while being given the injections by the Techs. As
she approached the chair she saw, slightly behind it and to its right, a rec-
tangular white box with rounded corners and a black, glassy top. On the
box were two different symbols: at its front, a violet-colored representation
of what looked a little like a winged garden hoe; on its side, a pink, double-
winged, eaglelike figure on a black metallic background. Carol had never
seen such symbols before and did not know if they meant anything. She was
not, in fact, sure she hadn't entirely imagined them, since she saw them for
only a brief moment as she approached the chair. She was much more curi-
ous about the chair, because there was a closed panel grafted to its back, out
of which came cables.

The craft's interior was illuminated by a large tube of continuous white
light attached to the ceiling. Beneath the light, along the wall where one
might expect portholes, were picture-window-like frames containing not
glass but some sort of slats. The slats, arranged in a regular interval around
the interior of the craft, were constantly in motion. Carol has no idea of
their function. They weren't what attracted her attention; what surprised
Carol was the way the chair molded its icy surface to her body and that di-
rectly in front of her there was a wire mesh cage containing four very young
horses.

One foal appeared distressed; a second seemed only a little anxious; a
third looked curious; and the fourth looked simply bored.

306

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

At Carol's side stood a Small Gray who kept telling her, Look at the
horses. Look at the horses. Out of the corner of her eye she could see the
Gray's hands moving across the marshmallowy box's black glass top. She
could not see what he was doing, only that each hand had four fingers and
no thumb.

In obedience to the Small Gray, Carol kept looking at the young foals.
Outwardly they appeared identical: they were brown with no markings
and between three and four months old. The only thing odd about them,
she told me, was their feet: instead of hooves, they had pads — soft, round,
flexible pads that flattened and spread when they put their weight on
them.

I think of other abductees' accounts of having been taken to a desert-
like wasteland with a dying red sun and ask Carol if these foals' feet would
be better suited to a soft, sandy surface than a hoof.

"Yes!" she says. "As soon as I saw them they reminded me of camels' feet,
except there were no toes."

"Could the foals have been a holographic projection?"

"I don't know," she says. "They looked real."

The foals looked real, she tells me, but they made no sound nor gave off
any odor — plus, they had these strange pads for feet. And that is why, Carol
explained, when she could not get the Doctor Being to tell her how she was
changing or why she could only eat "cow things," she asked him about
horses: she had wanted to discover if her dream had been real.

The Doctor's response was the same as mine. What horses? he asked.

Do you have horses here? On this ship? Carol asked.

We do not have horses here, the Being responded telepathically.
Okay, Carol thought, do you know about horses?
Horses, yes, he said. What about horses?

Well, about their feet, Carol said. And when the Being did not respond
in any way, she added, Their hooves?
Yes, he said. Horses are changed.

Here we go again! Carol thought. "Horses are changed." "People are
changed." She wondered how she could make the Being understand that
what she wanted to know was how did their horses' feet look. Our horses,
Carol said to him, the horses where I'm from, have hard feet. Their hooves are
hard.

No, no, no, the Doctor Being told Carol. Horses have changed.
Are their FEET changed?
Horses have changed.

Postconference Interview: Carol and Alice

307

Carol felt she wasn't getting anywhere. But then the Doctor Being
glided out of sight and returned a moment later bearing a thin, square,
translucent viewing screen measuring about eighteen inches square.

I will show you horses, the Being said.

Finally! Carol thought excitedly. Here's something I can relate to!

The Being lifted the screen until it was in front of Carol and then re-
leased it. The screen remained floating motionless in midair. It displayed a
sharp color image of dozens of mature, brown horses moving about — just
brown horses. There were no grays, no pintos, no chestnuts, no bays. The
horses had no markings, no distinguishing blazes, white socks, or black legs.
And there was nothing else in the image to help determine their size. The
background seemed to have been totally whited out. All Carol could see was
dozens of identical tiny brown horses with dark brown manes moving
about, criss-crossing in front of each other, turning around. No horses en-
tered the screen from the left or right; none left the screen, as one would ex-
pect were a camera in a fixed spot filming a wandering herd. As if penned
in by the boundaries of the image, the horses simply milled about — and
Carol couldn't see their feet!

These are horses, the Being said.

Yes, I KNOW that, Carol replied. But I can't see their feet!

Why do you want to see their feet? the Being asked.

Carol again tried to explain that the horses she had seen in her dream
had pads instead of hooves.

No, no, no, no, the Being said. Horses are changed. Horses are forever
changed.

No they're not! Carol insisted. Our horses still have hooves.

The Tall Gray's arm shot up and he plucked the screen out of the air and
disappeared with it behind Carol. A moment later he returned with another
screen identical to the first.

Cows, the Being said.

The image this time was of dozens of cows milling about. They were
black and white, splotchy, like Holsteins — except, unlike Holsteins, these
cows had two large, flexible tubes hanging down from their sides. One tube
emerged low on their ribs just behind their front legs; the other came out
higher up just in front of the cows' hind legs. The tubes, about twice the di-
ameter of a soda can, were gray, ribbed like dryer hoses, and sealed at the end
with some sort of black cap. Carol was concentrating on the tubes, trying to
see if they grew out of the cows or if they had been surgically added. Do all
the cattle have these tubes? she asked.

Cows are changed, the Doctor Being said. Cows are changed. Horses are
changed. People are changed. And he snatched this second screen out of the

308 CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

air, too. From behind her she could hear him say, You must only eat cow
things.

Here we go again, Carol thought.

You must only eat cow things, he repeated.

I can't ONLY eat cow things! Carol responded angrily.

The Doctor Being shot around her chair until he was hovering right be-
side Carol. He leaned forward over Carol so that his body was horizontal and
tipped his head so that it was vertical at a ninety -degree angle from his neck.
He pushed his face into Carol's so close that if he had had a nose it would
have bumped hers and she would have felt his breath. But the Tall Gray had
no nose as such, only a slight bump between two open holes in his face that
may or may not have been nostrils, and there was no breath to feel. Nor was
there any odor. She could not even sense a change in temperature.

The Doctor Being's face was directly opposite Carol's and she was peer-
ing straight into his huge, oval, nonreflective black eyes. She wanted to
flinch, pull back, look away, close her eyes, but she couldn't. She felt help-
less and frightened as the Being looked so deeply into her eyes that he
seemed to be seeing through her. She has no idea how long he stared at her;
it was as though time had stopped. She is not sure she even remained con-
scious. She knows only that the link between herself and the Being was so
intense that when the Tall Gray broke the connection and departed from
the room she was left with a headache.

The Doctor Being returned moments later with the two Tall Gray Tech-
nicians. You are not to act crazy, the Doctor told Carol.

Okay, Carol answered, / wont act crazy.

You are not to be crazy.

I won't be crazy, she thought, but this whole experience, the pictures, the
cows, is insane!

You are not to think you are crazy, the Doctor told her.
Yes, Carol said.

And once again the Being told her, You must eat only cow things.

And then it seemed to Carol he was finished with her and that the Techs
were going to dress her.

The two Techs had no problem getting Carol into her T-shirt, but her
blue jeans were more difficult. Without bothering with Carol's white cot-
ton panties, they managed to pull the jeans up over her knees, but they were
having trouble sliding them over her hips.

Carol asked, May I dress myself?

The Techs backed away, taking her jeans with them; the Doctor joined
them off to Carol's left side. Although she could hear none of what was
being said, she could tell from their bobbing heads that the discussion the

Postconference Interview: Carol and Alice

309

Beings were having was animated. And then one of the Techs brought
Carol's blue jeans back and dropped them at her feet.
You can dress yourself, the Doctor Being said.

Carol tried to sit up. She tensed her stomach muscles but nothing hap-
pened. She couldn't move. The Doctor Being raised his arm and made a
downward gesture as if ordering a dog to sit. Carol did not know what he
meant. He repeated the motion, and Carol realized he was trying to tell her
to push down with her legs. She pressed down as hard as she could and the
chair tipped forward, thrusting her out.

"I was up!" Carol tells me. "It was wonderful! I was standing and mov-
ing very slowly. Everything was as if in slow motion. If I'd had to hurry, I
don't think I could have.

"I got my jeans on and my shoes," Carol continues, "and I still wasn't
on the ground! I was still floating just above it. It's the strangest feeling, be-
cause it feels like your shoes are touching something, but you don't see any-
thing touching the bottom of your feet."

"What were the Beings doing while you dressed?" I ask.

"They became very agitated, very worried that I . . ." Carol pauses for
a moment, remembering. "I wouldn't say that they were frightened, but
they seemed concerned that maybe permitting me to move wasn't such a
good idea. I was led out by this one Tech who came about up to my chin,
which means he was maybe five feet tall. He was only about eighteen
inches in front of me, and I was looking at the back of his head, trying to
remember what he looked like. I was trying to see if I could detect a seam
on the back of his uniform. But there were no seams. There weren't any
shoulder blades or a spinal cord, either; there was nothing that stood out.
No visible definition of any kind. He had sloping shoulders; not particu-
larly wide, but now narrow either. . . . And his neck came right up to the
back of his head. He was just weird-looking from behind: this real large
head sitting like a daffodil on a stem, and there was no hair, veins, or any-
thing on the head. . . ."

The Tall Gray Tech led Carol towards the wall. The second Tech and the
Doctor Being followed behind her. A panel she had not noticed bef ore sud-
denly lifted and disappeared into the ceiling, and the four of them floated
through the opening into a brilliantly illuminated white corridor. Carol
heard an airy swish as the panel dropped back down and vacuum-sealed be-
hind them — at least she thinks it was the sound of the panel closing behind
her. She couldn't turn to look. And besides, she was distracted by the long
row of identical two-and-a-half-foot square boxes aligned along the corri-
dor's left-hand wall.

Look at the boxes, the Doctor Being was telling her.

310 CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

To Carol, the boxes looked like giant marshmallows: rounded corners,
white, and without any visible markings.
Look at the boxes, the doctor repeated.

There were at least twenty-five of them, all the same size, all perfect
cubes. They were not touching each other; instead, the boxes were spaced
evenly the length of the corridor.

Remember the boxes, the Being told her.

Carol continued to fix her eyes on the boxes as she floated past them
down the corridor. At the end of the corridor there was one last box identi-
cal to all the others.

Look at the box, the Being told her.

Carol did as he ordered, and the next instant, she was walking alone
back down the hill to her West Virginia state park log cabin.

"I don't remember coming out of the ship; I don't remember a door or
a hatch opening, or floating down from above. I don't remember any of
that," Carol tells me. "I had no idea what time it was, because I didn't know
anything had happened. The whole incident had been erased the instant I
was back on the hill. I remember I tried to eat dinner. I remember before
that sitting on the porch after the storm, watching the ground fog and play-
ing with Goldie. It was getting dark and I was a little worried about Alice,
because she hadn't arrived and I figured she wasn't going to. And I wondered
what I had done all day. I remember thinking, Oh, hell, the whole day's
gone! I'd lost an entire day. I remember going into the cabin and making hot
dogs and baked beans and a cup of coffee — and then I threw up.

"I didn't think anything of it," Carol tells me. "I didn't at that time have
any recall of the Doctor Tall Gray telling me, 'You must only eat cow
things.' So I never made that link. I just thought only that what I had eaten
didn't agree with me. And around nine-thirty or ten o'clock I got undressed
and went to bed, still unaware that anything at all had happened to me at
that point."

"When did you discover that your underpants were missing?" I ask.

Carol laughs. "Actually, it was not until the next morning, Wednesday,
when everything came back. It was something I didn't think about, which
was odd. Because with those jeans, if I don't wear panties underneath I slice
myself in two!"

Wednesday morning Carol awoke in the log cabin's double bed with
Goldie clinging to the outside of the window screen over the headboard.
The huge, strange insect had presumably stayed there all night. Carol
climbed out of bed, looked at the window screen, and said, "Good morn-
ing, Goldie." And Goldie flew around the cabin to the porch to wait for
Carol to step outside.

Postconference Interview: Carol and Alice

3 1 1

When Carol went to brush her teeth, she discovered there was no water.
She tried the shower and the kitchen faucet, but they were dry, too. Since
none of the other cabins in her area were occupied, she decided to drive
down to the lodge to report that the water was off.

Carol dressed, picked up her car keys, grabbed her purse, and went out
the screen door, with Goldie practically in her ear. As she walked down the
path she was surprised to see her car in the middle of the road. What's it
doing there? she asked herself. She wondered if, during the night, it had
slipped out of gear and rolled backwards down the slight hill into the road.

At the end of the path, the instant she touched the car's door handle the
entire abduction incident of the previous day returned in her mind.

"Everything just came back all at one time!" she tells me. "It was like
being hit over the head with a stick!"

It rained around three-thirty or four o'clock, just as it had rained the af-
ternoon before. Carol had been sitting on her porch waiting for the rain to
stop. By five or so it was only drizzling, and Carol looked over her shoulder
up the hill behind her to the neighboring cabin on the other side of the
road. It was misty, but otherwise she could see objects clearly. Standing in
the grass in front of one of the unoccupied cabins was a figure who looked
like a Gray.

At that distance she couldn't be sure whether it was a Small Gray or a
Tall Gray, but it was definitely one of the Gray Beings, and she was suddenly
afraid they were coming back for her again. But then, in her head, she heard
the Gray say, Do not be crazy. Do not think crazy.

Carol, relieved that she wasn't going to be taken, thought, Fine. I won't
be crazy. And, while Carol was looking at him, the Being disappeared. And
that was the end of it — in a manner of speaking.

One morning a week later, back with Alice at the farm, Carol awoke in
pain with two more fresh punctures just below her belly button. A clear
fluid was leaking from the holes. And a week after that she awoke with
blood on her arm and spots of blood coming from her belly's double punc-
ture wounds. Furthermore, every time she accidentally ate something that
was not a beef or dairy product, she broke out in a rash and suffered severe
stomach cramps.

On September 21, a month before my visit to the horse farm, Carol was
hypnotized by Budd Hopkins in Washington. Along with filling in some of
the blanks in her memory of the state park abduction episode, the session
gave Hopkins an opportunity to attempt to countermand the Being's "You
must only eat cow things" order. Afterwards, Carol, Alice, Hopkins, and

3 1 2

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

Dick Hall all went out to dinner together. Carol was looking forward to
having something other than beef. At the restaurant, she was so sure that the
"deprogramming" had worked that she ordered one of her favorite appetiz-
ers: clam chowder. She managed one sip of chowder and immediately dou-
bled over with severe stomach cramps.

"The cramps were so painful, I couldn't function," Carol tells me. "I
couldn't eat. I couldn't sit at the table. I was suffering so much I made every-
body's dinner miserable. I had cramps the entire drive home, all that night,
and the next morning a rash appeared."

I spend the second day of my trip to the horse farm visiting with the
two women the Maryland scenes where Carol's abductions had taken place.
The landscape and buildings are as she described them; there is nothing out
of the ordinary about the abduction sites at all. Granted, it is a warm,
bright, sunny day and not a dark, misty night; but still I find it difficult to
believe that anything so strange as Carol described could happen among
such lovely open fields and rolling hills.

When we return to the farm, Carol goes off" to tend the horses and I sit
down with Alice. Since the middle of July, Alice tells me, she had been in-
creasingly tormented by headaches. She was convinced they were caused by
her eyes. Alice is nearsighted, but her prescription had improved from a
—4.75 to a —4.00 in nine months, and within a few more months to a —3.75.
In July, when her headaches became too prevalent to ignore, Alice went to
see her eye doctor. Her eyeglass prescription was then at —3.50.

Because Carol, too, had reported recent improvements in her vision, and
attributed it to her abductions, Alice was concerned that the changes in her
eyesight might indicate that something similar was happening to her. But
Alice, who had never had any flashbacks or conscious memories of an alien
contact, was too analytical to accept without more proof that any such thing
as encounters with alien beings might actually be occurring to her, too.

According to Alice, in the three months since her July visit to the oph-
thalmologist, her eyes improved to —3.25 and then to —3.00; but her
headaches haven't gone away.

I ask Alice if the change in her vision couldn't be attributed to normal
aging. "As we get older, we become more farsighted, and this can happen
quite quickly," I say.

"It could be," Alice says. "Maybe that is what's happening. I don't know.
But from what the doctors told me, my eyes were supposed to be getting
worse, not better."

"Do you have difficulty focusing?"

"Not anymore. And I've also given up my reading glasses. I don't need
them anymore."

Postconference Interview: Carol and Alice

313

"Are you suggesting that your eyes are improving because of your ab-
ductions, too?"
"Possibly."

Dave Jacobs has identified among abductees what he calls the "tunnel
effect": a phenomenon in which abductees, or those who think they might
be, begin explaining everyday occurrences as being the result of alien inter-
vention. It is the same effect experienced by victims of a household robbery
who will then attribute every creak and thump in their houses at night to
prowlers. Carol and Alice are both women in their forties, the age at which
farsightedness begins to hit. The changes in their vision do not seem other-
worldly to me.

I ask Alice whether there were any other indications that led her to be-
lieve she might have been abducted.

"No," she answers, "I've just had a lot of things I've always explained
away before, things like you and I have talked about — scars in the right
places on my body that I've never paid attention to. Some Missing-Time
episodes that I hadn't really thought of before; I just figured I'd read the
clock wrong. But now I'm convinced they really are Missing Times."

"What Missing-Time episodes are you referring to here?" I ask.

"I guess the one that is most compelling to me happened a year ago in
July," Alice replies. "I was visiting a bunch of colleges down south for work:
Georgia, Alabama, Florida, Tennessee, and so on. I flew into Nashville and
drove down to Huntsville, Alabama. They said it should take an hour and
a half to get to Huntsville; it was all open highways. But it took me three. I
thought I was just driving slow or something. . . ."

"Could they have been wrong at Nashville about the length of time it
would take to get to Huntsville?" I ask.

"No, because then, when I came back to Nashville from Huntsville, it
took me only an hour and a half on the same roads with the same traffic."
Alice brushes her long blond hair back from her forehead. "I still don't know
about that one," she says.

'And you think there were other Missing-Time episodes that same
trip?"

"Yes. The worst one was when I was in Tuskegee, in Alabama," Alice says.
"I'd spent the day there with people in the college and I had to drive down
to Tallahassee for meetings the next morning. They said it took three, maybe
four hours to get there. I left Tuskegee around four-thirty that afternoon.

"The next clear image I have about that trip was driving through this
small town in Georgia," Alice continues, "and just outside the town I got
picked up for speeding. I was going 85 mph, but the police officer said I'd
slowed down as I passed him, so he gave me a ticket for going 78. And he

314 CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

said, 'Where are you headed?' I said, 'To Tallahassee.' And at the time I felt
sort of disoriented, sick, as if I was getting the flu. When he gave me the
ticket it was already seven-thirty p.m. I had been driving for three hours,
but I was probably only a hundred miles out of Tuskegee!

"I finally got down to Tallahassee after ten-thirty that night," Alice says.
"I checked into the hotel and went straight to my room. I still wasn't feel-
ing well. I took a cold shower — which is unusual for me — and went right
to bed. The next day I still felt sort of sick, too. Not throwing-up sick, just
an uneasy stomach like you get with the flu, which is what I thought it was
at the time. But the point is, it took me close to six and a half hours to get
to Tallahassee, and it should only have been a three-to-four-hour trip. I have
no idea what happened in between, but I think something did."

"Other than the Missing Time, what makes you think that?" I ask.

"The way I was feeling," Alice replies. "Disoriented. Sick to my stom-
ach. It was just uncharacteristic behavior for me. Yes, I speed when I drive,
but not, usually, that much. Also, the police officer wrote on the ticket that
there was 'moderate traffic' I didn't recall seeing another car for what had
seemed like hours. But I had the feeling that the reason why I was speeding
was because I just wasn't getting there. It was taking too long for me to get
to Tallahassee.

"And, of course," Alice adds, "this was before I knew anything about
this alien-abduction stuff. But the more I think back on it, the more I think
yes, something happened."

A month later I meet Alice and Carol at Budd Hopkins's New York stu-
dio, where Alice, under hypnosis, provides an explanation for why her drive
to Tallahassee took so long: she stopped to give birth to a half-alien baby.

CHAPTER XIV

Postconference Interview

Carol and Alice — First Hypnosis Session
at Budd Hopkins's Studio

On Friday, November 20, I arrive at Budd Hopkins's Canal Street studio
ahead of Alice and Carol, who are taking the train up from Washington.
While Budd and I wait for the two women to appear, we speak a bit about
Carol's experience at the West Virginia state park. I mention that I think it
curious Carol returned from that episode missing her underpants; but Budd
assures me that the loss of such an article of clothing is not uncommon at
all, that he has had other cases of women abductees who returned without
their underpants, or, even stranger, wearing the wrong underpants — mean-
ing someone else's. He also tells me that Linda Cortile once awoke from an
experience wearing her pajama tops on her legs, and when she got out of
bed and tried to walk, she tripped on the sleeves and fell.

I ask Budd if he has any suspicions that the abduction phenomenon
may be being caused by something other than extraterrestrials.

"Well, when I say 'extraterrestrials,' that's a blanket term to cover what-
ever it is out there that's not from here," he replies. "People get into these
huge arguments about 'interdimensionals' or 'meta-terrestrials.' There's
been every damn thing. I think I've told you about the remark of the man
who said he didn't believe they could be extraterrestrials because they
weren't 'doing the sort of things extraterrestrials would do.' That's one of the
great lines," Budd says, laughing. "I think as soon as the man uttered it he
realized how absurd it was to say a thing like that. So when I say 'extrater-
restrial,' it's a blanket term to cover whatever this is. But I'm absolutely con-
vinced that this is not self-generated — although there may be people for
whom it is. With Carol I don't have any doubt. I don't know what to say
about Alice except that the chances are, considering everything else, it is not
self-generated with her, either.

3 1 6

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

"One thing is the self-doubt people present who are coming up with
this stuff," Budd continues. "If someone has a delusion . . . Take a para-
noid, for example. A paranoid is wrapped in certainty. He knows what's
going on: 'The CIA is coming in every night and pumping poison gas under
the door.' A paranoid doesn't ask, Am I making this up?' They don't admit
the remotest possibility they are wrong. But everybody that comes to us is
saying, 'Can this be.real? Is this what's happening to me? It sounds so crazy!'
It's the initial response: 'I know it's real, and yet I can't accept that it's real.'
'I know it's happening, and yet I'm filled with doubt about it.' 'It's crazy!
How can it be real?'

"You see, the basic underlying thing is always going to be the people's
need to deny because this is just too crazy — this just can't be! When you think
about it: People floating through walls ... I mean, how the hell does some-
body get floated out of a twelfth-floor apartment up a beam of light?"

I tell Budd about Carol's granddaughter, Stacy, and the lighted ball that
enables the child to pass through walls.

"Well, we've certainly got dozens and dozens and dozens of cases of
those," he says. "But, see, once you admit the physics of this on any level —
that one can float through a closed window, that a craft can go thousands of
miles per hour and stop on a dime without apparently decelerating — once
you allow these things, then you've really got no floor under you in terms of
conventional physics. It just doesn't work to say, 'That's impossible.' The
whole damn thing is impossible!"

Budd tells me about his conversation with J. Allen Hynek. One morn-
ing, as the two men had breakfast together, Hopkins described a case of his
and told Hynek, "You know, I live every day of my life as if none of this were
true." According to Budd, Hynek responded, "Oh! I live every day of my life
as if none of this were true, too. How could we get through a day with it
fixed firmly in your mind that it's really going on?"

Budd's doorbell rings. Carol and Alice have arrived.

For the first thirty minutes Budd and the two women discuss what to
investigate. Budd decides he will hypnotize Carol first. The event he wants
to explore is the one that triggered her flashback at the conference: why had
she hidden in the closet as a child?

"I think that's something we ought to try to go into, because it's going
back to when things start," Budd tells her. "Sometimes when you get back
to the very beginning of things, it sort of establishes a pattern that then
makes a lot of other stuff fall into place and make sense."

Carol is apprehensive. She tells Budd she is afraid that if she remembers
an early incident, then "all the rest of it is going to come rushing back all at
one time, and I'm going to explode from all of this."

Postconference Interview: Carol and Alice

3 1 7

"No, listen," Budd tells her, "all the way through this there's been a
sense that even though you have remembered a lot of things that came in a
rush from here and there, you still haven't had so much stuff come at you
that it's been overwhelming."

"Except in West Virginia," Carol says. "That was almost — "

"That's partly because you remembered it all, too," Budd tells her.

"Well, yes, all at one time," Carol says. "I was mentioning to Alice why
it took touching the car's door handle for it to come back. And I began to
think it was something the Beings did. They gave me that as a catalyst be-
cause if I had remembered it from the time when I came back, I would have
been alone in that cabin, isolated, two and a half miles from the next indi-
vidual, with no way of getting off the mountain at night. And it would have
been too much to deal with."

"Well, chalk one up for some consideration on their part," Budd says
wryly.

"I don't know if it was consideration or just saving my sanity for some
other purpose," Carol says.

She reports to Budd that by the time she was telling me of her West Vir-
ginia episodes, she had already begun to feel detached from them, as though
they had happened to a second party or even a third party; but while com-
ing back from hypnosis it had seemed very real. She can still feel it, she ex-
plains. But now that she has gotten farther from the experience, specific
incidents and their sequence have become, she says, "real, real fuzzy."

Budd tells her there were three or four explanations for this: "(a) that it
was deeply traumatic; (b) you're in an altered state when it happens; (c)
you're remembering it vividly through hypnosis, which is already another
altered state; and (d) there's a powerful need to deny."

"I still go back and say that probably didn't happen," Carol tells him.
She thinks for a moment, then asks, "If you had to pick between what you
consciously remember, what comes out under hypnosis, what you remem-
ber later, and what you relate down the road, which would be the most ac-
curate?"

"Of course I tend to feel hypnotic recollections are very strong and
real," Budd replies, "because the state you're in under hypnosis is very akin
to the state you're in when it happens."

John Mack would agree. In an informal talk given before Interface, the
Holistic Education Center in Cambridge, five months later, he says:

There's a lot of controversy around hypnosis: Is it accurate? Do people re-
port memories correctly? The research on this shows that the accuracy of
memory increases according to how salient the matter is under discussion.

3 1 8

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

In other words, if it's something that vitally affects the person — a trauma,
a rape, abuse — and it's reported with affect, with emotion, hypnosis
fleshes out what they otherwise can remember. Where hypnosis is not ac-
curate is where the matter is not of significance to that person. That might
be in the courtroom, for instance, where somebody is being asked to re-
port whether a car came in from the left or the right, or who was driving.
There they were a witness, but it was not of vital importance; and they feel
they have to come up with something. But where it is something as cen-
tral to the well-being of an individual as this abduction phenomenon is, I
have no reason to doubt what is reported. And people who do this work,
who use hypnosis in this, are careful to be very open ended, and not lead
the witness.

Hypnosis, for reasons that we don't entirely understand, seems
uniquely capable of undoing the amnesia that occurs in the abductions —
an amnesia which seems to have two dimensions to it. The first is the re-
pression that ordinarily occurs in people when there is something that is
disturbing and traumatic. Here the psyche will dissociate, put the experi-
ence out of consciousness so the individual can go on functioning. Many
of the abductees have had these experiences throughout their lives. It is a
lifelong phenomenon when one gets to know the full story in any given
case. The repression protects the person. . . . But there is another element
to this amnesia; and that is that every person at some point will report that
the aliens forbid them to report it, told them not to remember, that there's
some switching-off of memory which is imposed. And hypnosis seems al-
most to fit just like a template, perfectly, to undo the repression, the for-
gotten elements, and to bring back memories. 1

Of John Mack's then sixty-nine cases, he had done between one and
seven hypnosis sessions on forty of them.

Prior to hypnotizing Carol, Budd Hopkins wants to make certain he un-
derstands who would have been in the house with Carol when she had had
her childhood closet experiences. Carol says her eighteen-month-younger
sister, Mary, and her parents would have been there.

Budd establishes that the closet in which the incidents took place was
in the second-floor bedroom Carol and Mary shared. She remembers there
were children's clothes on the hangers and a shelf above the closet rod which
held boxes and sweaters. "The closet was not real big," Carol says.

Budd asks Carol if she ever went into the closet to play.

"No, that's where I went for safety," Carol replies. She tells how her fa-
ther remembers mornings when he would find her asleep in the closet with
all the clothes taken down from the hangers and wrapped around her. "He

Postconference Interview: Carol and Alice

3 1 9

told me he was constantly digging me out of piles of clothes and hangers,"
Carol says. "I felt the closet was a very safe place."

"The feeling was that you were protecting yourself against the light, is
that right?" Budd asks.

"I don't remember ever being frightened by something you could see ex-
cept for the light," Carol replies. "I was afraid that if the light touched me,
'they' could do something — whatever that was. I can't even verbalize what
it was. I was safe only if I could keep the light from touching me, so I would
try to block it out."

"I think this closet incident would be a good thing to look into," Budd
says.

Carol sort of shrugs, then nods her assent.

Budd and Carol discuss what should be Carol's "safe place" during the
hypnosis regression session, that place in her mind to which Budd can take
her if the recalled events become too frightening and she needs to retreat.

Carol says that when she does "relaxation," she visualizes a "round room
that's underground. I take a ladder down and it has curtains that cover the
windows. And there's a big, long comfortable sofa and I sit down on the sofa
and I have a little button. And when I want to look at something I can push
the button and open the drapes; and when I don't want to look at it I
push the button and close the drapes. That seems to feel pretty safe, and it
doesn't exist."

Budd thinks for a moment, then says, "I don't like some of the impli-
cations of that: the round room and buttons and reclining. ..." Carol's
"safe place" bears too many similarities to the interior of a disc. "How about
a garden?" he asks her.

"I love rose gardens," Carol says.

"Okay," Budd says. "Let's have a rose garden with a hedge around it on
a very sunny day."

There is some discussion of the garden and what other problems might
arise. Budd tells of the woman who went to a New Age hypnotist "because
she was trying to explore some stuff. And she started into this abduction ex-
perience, her car stopped, she was terrified and everything else, and she was
getting so scared. And the hypnotist, using an old formula, said, 'You're safe!
You're surrounded by white light!' "

Carol and Alice laugh. The New Age hypnotist's image, of course, is the
classic prelude to an abduction. Budd's point is that unless the hypnotist is
thoroughly briefed by the subject, he might inadvertently bring something
into the session he doesn't mean to.

After a short break Carol lies down on Budd's black couch, her head
resting on a pillow, her body covered by a soft, pink wool blanket. The lights

320 CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

in the studio have been dimmed. Budd is sitting in a hard wooden chair at
Carol's head; Alice, who has pulled out some knitting, is sitting cross-legged
on the floor by Carol's feet. I am seated at Budd's right shoulder, a position
from which I can see and hear Carol's responses clearly.

Budd asks Carol when she graduated from high school. She answers
that it was in 1964 and tells him the name and location of the school she at-
tended.

Budd makes a note on the yellow pad he holds on his lap. "Okay, just
to begin this process as before," he says, "it's going to be very easy. You've
done this before and know what it's like. I just want you to get that feeling,
Carol, of going down into yourself. Into your own mind and body, away
from the outside. The sense that you have when you go to bed at night of
closing off the outside world and going down into yourself. It's a very safe,
comfortable feeling of being down into yourself and away from the outside.
I want you to feel the comfort of the bed under you, the couch, starting at
your heels. You can feel the way the bed supports your feet; and, higher, you
can feel the curvature of the calves of your legs. You can feel the way the
couch curves up around each of your legs, supporting your lower legs and
higher at your thighs. ..."

Budd is leaning forward, cupping his chin in his hand. His voice is low;
he is speaking slowly as he talks Carol's body down, moving her deeper and
deeper into a hypnotic sleep.

"In your thighs, your upper legs," he is saying, "you are feeling that
wonderful soothing flow of warmth and peace; your whole body is feeling
comfortable" — on "comfortable" his tone rises to a slightly higher note —
"and relaxed," he says; on "relaxed" the tone lowers again. "Feeling peaceful
[rising] . . . relaxed [lowering]. "The two notes rise and fall like Carol's chest
as she breathes.

Not quite ten minutes later, when he is certain that Carol is "asleep,"
Budd "takes" her into her safe place, the rose garden. "It is a sunny summer
morning, the roses are in full bloom," he tells her. "I want you to see yourself
in this garden. You're just enjoying this incredibly blue sky, the warmth of the
sun on your skin, the fragrance of those roses. It's just so unbelievably beauti-
ful. And you can hear the sounds of the bees, the insects, the birds. That
wonderful sense of humming, the sounds of nature, alive. Alive like you . . ."

There is silence broken only by the click of Alice's knitting needles.

After another couple of minutes Budd tells Carol that he wants her to
know that she can go back to that "beautiful, secluded, fragrant, wonderful
rose garden any other time you wish and would like to be in a beautif ul, spe-
cial place. But right now I just want you to feel your body relaxing even
more deeply. I want you just to enjoy that sense of your body resting, your

Postconference Interview: Carol and Alice

32 1

body at peace. Enjoying that sense of calm, the quiet of the room, your
whole body feeling comfortable . . . relaxed . . .
"Peaceful . . . relaxed.

"And in this very relaxed state, with your mind extremely alert, I want
you to go back in time, back a lot of years ago, back to the time that you
were a very, very little girl, living in that first house in — " Budd pauses and
looks down at his notes — "in Cornwall, Maryland. I want you to see your-
self in front of a mirror as a very little girl. A little girl of three or four or so.
Living in that house. Sharing a room with Mary. A little girl.

"I want you to see in the mirror how little you are, how small and in-
nocent," Budd continues. "Again you can look into your face, your eyes,
and see the playfulness and fun a little girl has. And at the same time there's
some undercurrent in her face, because not everything is right. Other things
are there, as with any child. You can see in your eyes and your face other
things that are not calming. . . .

"And as we gaze at that image of yourself in the mirror, looking at your-
self, I want you to get the feeling of going into your house. You're going up-
stairs to your room. Everything is big. The steps look steep and big because
you're so little. You go to your bedroom, the room you share with Mary, and
as you look in the doorway on this sunny day, you can see how the room is
arranged, and," Budd now instructs Carol, "you can speak whenever you like.

"As you look into your room," Budd tells Carol, "I want you to manage
to answer some questions about it. As you look, do you see one bed there?
Or are there two beds?"
Iwo, Carol says.

I am struck by her voice. It is that of a four-year-old girl!

"Are these bunk beds?" Budd asks her.

"No."

"They're two little twin beds done separately?"
"Yes," she says very quietly.
"How many windows are there in the room?"
"There are two together."

"Two windows together," Budd says. "Now, is there a closet in the
room?

"Um-hm."

"And as you're standing in the doorway," Budd says, "you're so little, a
little girl looking at the room, is the closet to your left, to your right, or is it
ahead of you?"

Carol thinks for a moment. "It's on that side," she says in her little-girl
voice, making a jerky motion to her left. At the chronological age Carol now
is in her mind, she does not yet know her left from her right.

322 CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

"It's on the left side. Okay," Budd says. "Now as you go into the room
and you can see the closet, you can see Mary's bed, and you can see your
bed, let's allow it to start getting dark in the room. It's starting to get onto
nighttime, because at night a little girl like you has to go to bed. Mary has
to go to bed. ..."

Budd pauses to give Carol time to make the transition to night in her
mind.

"I want you to get the feeling of getting into your bed," Budd contin-
ues. "Your mommy and dad come in to make sure you're in bed, tucked in.
And then there's that time when you're alone in the room, Mary is there,
and it's very, very quiet in the room, and at some point, Carol, there's going
to be something that's going to startle you or frighten you. We know that
because we know you went to the closet for safety. We don't yet know what
it is that startles you. Perhaps you had a bad dream. Perhaps you heard a
noise you can't understand. But you know what it is that's frightening you,
that's going to drive you to trying to hide. So you're lying in bed, and what's
going to happen is I'm going to count to three, because whatever dream or
memory or whatever it is, everything has a beginning, a first moment when
you sense that something is different. Something's going to change here.
And you're going to sense it. . . .

"My hand is going to come down on your hand, on your right hand
through the blanket. And that's a signal," Budd instructs. "When you feel
the warmth of my hand, you'll know it's okay, that you're safe and with me.
And it will be okay to remember what that was that was frightening the lit-
tle girl at that time.

"So, one, we're at the edge of that memory, that very beginning . . ."
Budd tells her.

"Two, my hand is coming down on your hand now. ..." Budd rests his
hand gently on top of Carol's. And as he touches her he says, "Three!"

Carol does not speak. Her head tosses restlessly back and forth on the
pillow. Her breath quickens, then quickens some more. She is almost pant-
ing now.

"Tell me what's happening," Budd says gently. "You're all right. . . . Feel
my hand. . . . You're okay."

"AYYYIIEEEEE!" Carol's scream is so loud we all jump. "DADDY!"

"It's all right," Budd says, trying to reassure her. "You're safe. My hand's
on yours now. Do you feel my hand?"

" Daddy: 'DADDY?" Her voice is quavering with fear.

"Can you feel my hand on yours, Carol?" he asks gendy. "Do you feel
my hand?"

"Ohhhhhh! Ohhhhh! Daddy?"

Postconference Interview: Carol and Alice

323

"It's okay. Daddy's going to come. Your daddy's going to come," Budd
says. "What are you seeing? Why are you calling your daddy?"
"The cats are coming in!" Carol replies, panicked.
"Tell me what's happening."

"The cats are back! . . . Daddy?" Carol cries out. "Ohhhhhhh!"

"Well, you can tell Daddy all about that when he comes," Budd says
gently. "But instead of your Daddy, just tell me right now. What are the cats
like?"

Carol is too frightened to answer.

"Hold my hand. Feel my hand." Budd says soothingly. "Tell me about
the cats."

"They're in the window," she says.

"The cats are in the window?" Budd asks. "What do they look like? Do
they have big whiskers?"

Carol moans and clutches Budd's pink blanket to her face.

Not for one moment does Budd believe that "cats" are what Carol is re-
ally seeing.

"Big, long whiskers?" Budd repeats. "They're not going to hurt you.
We're not going to let them hurt you. We're just remembering this. Tell me
about the cats."

Carol still cannot answer.

"Carol, tell me about the cats," Budd says more insistently. "Feel my
hand. I'm right here with you. Tell me about the cats. Do they have long
whiskers, these cats?"

"No. They're just cats," she says in her little-girl voice. "Looking in the
window."

"Okay, now here's what I want," Budd tells her. "I want you to take a
deep breath. Take a deep breath, Carol. Take a deep breath. Just feel your-
self relax, take a deep breath just to relax. ..."

Carol takes a deep breath, then another.

"That's good. Deep breaths," Budd says. "Feel my hand? Feel my hand
on yours? Okay. Now just rest. ..."

Carol's breath slows, and as she brings herself back under control, Budd
says, "So the cats are looking in the window. Now you're a very, very obser-
vant and smart little girl, and you're going to be safe here. Tell me, is there
one cat? Two cats? How many cats are there?"

Carol's breath begins to quicken again.

"You can peek," Budd tells her. "You don't have to let them know you're
looking. You just open your eyelids a tiny, little bit, and you can see just
through your eyelids. They don't know you're looking."

Her head tosses on the pillow.

324 CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

"How many cats are there? Take a look. Through your eyelids. Just open
a little bit."

Carol mumbles something.

"Hmmm? I'm sorry?" Budd asks.

"I don't want to look at them," Carol says.

"Okay, here's what you're going to do. You're not going to look. You're
just going to close your eyes, okay? Just close your eyes. Now I want you to
tell me how your body feels. Be just a little girl lying there in bed, and this
has been scary. How does your body feel? Tense? Relaxed? How does your
body feel?"

"Co-Id," she says in her little-girl voice.

"You feel cold? What are you wearing? Do you have enough blankets on
you?

"It's summertime. It's hot."

"It's summertime. It's hot. But you feel cold?"

"Feel cold," Carol says. "My pink nightgown on."

"Okay, you have your pink nightgown on and you're cold. But how do
your arms and legs feel?"

Carol pauses, thinking; then, still in a little girl's voice, but with a hint
of frustration, she responds, "I don't know!"

"You just lie there," Budd says gently. "You're going to keep your eyes
closed and you're just going to listen. I know it's very scary, but we know
that everything was fine in the morning and you were safe." Budd pauses,
then asks, "What's happening? Do you hear anything? Or what do you
sense?

"They're at the window," Carol says, very frightened, "an' — an' — and I
can't wake Mary up!"
"Do you call to her?"

Carol replies in a very small, scared, broken voice, "I yelled to her!"
"Did you yell real loud?"

"I — I — I yelled real loud," she says between little gasps of breath, "an —
an — and my daddy won't come."

"Well, your daddy eventually does come," Budd reassures her. "You see
Daddy eventually. It may not be until morning, we don't know, but you'll
see Daddy eventually."

"Why won't anybody wake up?" Carol pitifully asks.

"Where do you think the cats are now?" Budd asks her.

"Inside!"

"Inside? Where are they inside in relation to you?"
"They're inside the window!" Carol replies, clearly terrified.

Postconference Interview: Carol and Alice

325

"So they came in," Budd says. "Are they little cats or big cats?"
"ifrgxats!"

"Are they down on all fours?" Budd asks.

"I don't knowwww!" She does not want to look.

"But you know they're big cats. They shouldn't be here, should they?"

"No!" she says firmly. "They came in!"

"Why don't you just say something to those cats right now. What do
you want to say to those cats?" Budd asks her.
" Go away!" Carol says. "GO AWAY!"

"We know they finally do go away," Budd says reassuringly. "We know
that happens. But let's see now, they're inside the window? Now let's just see
what's happening."

Carol makes little grunting noises, "Unh — unh — unh — it's bright in
here. All this light coming in the window!"

"This light coming in the window, is it from a streetlight outside?"

"No! Nooo!" she insists. "There's no streetlight out there! There
shouldn't be a light out there! It's coming in the window, and" she says, her
voice rising again in terror, "it's gonna hurt me!" She is whimpering with
fright.

"Carol, do you know how, when they make movies, they have those big
cameras that can go up in the air and look down and you can see a whole
big scene?" Budd asks her. "Have you ever seen that?"

She shakes her head no. Carol, as the four-year-old she now is under
hypnosis, has no idea what Budd is talking about.

"Okay, we'll come back to that another time," Budd says agreeably.
"But right now let's look at the light. Is the light colored? Or is it white? You
have a very good power of observation."

"Buh-lew," Carol says in her little-girl voice.

"It's blue light, okay," Budd says. "Now, is there any sound? Do you
hear anything? Do the cats meow or talk to you or something?" Budd asks.
"No," she says insistently.
"Do you talk to them?"

"NO!" Carol's breath is quickening. She is getting scared again.
"Feel my hand, feel my hand," Budd says soothingly. "Now let's take an-
other nice deep breath. A real deep breath."
Carol inhales deeply.

"Oh, that's good. Fill your lungs. Feel your lungs fill up with air and
relax. That's good, just relax. Just relax. . . . It's very scary, it's very scary,
but we know in the morning everything's okay. . . ." He waits for Carol to
calm down. "So, what's going to happen with these cats?" he asks her. "We

326

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

know they left, they leave in the morning, but before they leave let's see
what they do."

"I don't want tooo," Carol says, near tears.

"Well, I don't want you to have to look at them," Budd says. "Let's just
sense — tell me how your body feels?"
"Scared," she answers very quiedy.

"Your body feels scared. . . . You know," Budd says, "sometimes cats
jump up on the bed and — "

" Dad-dyyyy?" Carol calls out and bursts into tears.

"Your daddy's there in the morning. Right now this is very difficult to
go through. He comes in the morning, and, you know, when you wake up
in the morning, are the cats there, or are they gone?"

"They're gone," Carol answers, still crying.

"Remember that," he tells her. "It's just very scary right now. So let's just
see what happens. ..."

"They're putting something in my ear-r-r!" Carol protests and cries out
with pain.

"They're putting something in your ear?" Budd asks.

"In my ear!" Carol wails. "He stuck something in my ear! And it h-hurts!"

"Okay, now listen to me, when I count to three that ear thing will be all
over. One . . . you feel it in your ear . . . two . . . now, three.'lt's all over. The
ear thing is over — whatever that is that the cat put in, the cat's leaving. The
cat took it out — whatever it is." Budd pauses for a moment, then says,
"Now, let's get rid of those cats. Do you want to get rid of those cats?"

"Yes!" Carol says, snuffling.

"Do they go back through the window? Is that how they get out?"
"/ don't know!" she says in a tiny voice.

"They're gone. We're rid of those cats. What happens when they leave?"
"I go in the closet."
"You go in the closet."
"And then I wake up."

"You wake up inside the closet? Does it feel better in the closet?"
"Yes!" Carol says, crying. Then she adds, "They'll take her, Mary, next
time!

"Well, you go in the closet. We're not going to worry about Mary right
now. We're going to worry about Carol right now. So little Carol goes into
the closet there, does she? Does she make a little bed in there? What does
she do?"

"Pulls all the clothes down onto the floor," she says, still crying, "and
pushes them into the door." Her breath is ragged.

"Does the little girl go to sleep in there eventually?" Budd asks her.

Postconference Interview: Carol and Alice

327

"No. I don't fall asleep. Gotta watch the door."
"You mean the door to the closet?"
Carol nods yes.

"Now, let's just move this ahead," Budd instructs her. "See, with all
memories and dreams it gets to be morning again. Morning always comes,
the sun always comes up. It feels better as the sun comes up. Let's take an-
other easy, deep breath. . . . Fill the lungs. ..."

Carol inhales deeply.

"Oh, that's a good deep breath, a real deep breath," Budd tells her.
"Feeling much better now, clothes are all around you, you're feeling safe
now. You're feeling safe in there behind the door as long as you've got your
own little place. Feeling safer, feeling safer . . ."

Carol is breathing more regularly now.

"Okay, morning comes and the sun comes up," Budd continues. "The
sun comes up, and is your dad going to come in? . . . Does he come in and
find you in the morning?"

'Yes," Carol answers in a tiny voice.

"Does your mom?"

"My mom comes in when Mary is crying."
"Mary's crying?" Budd asks. "Why is Mary crying?"
Carol whispers, "Because I'm not there."

"I can understand that," Budd says. "So your mommy comes in. ... I
bet you're glad to see her, aren't you!"
"No!" she says firmly.

"No? Why not?" Budd asks, surprised. "Because you want to see your
dad?"

"I want Daddy!" Carol says, sniffling. "It's awfully cold!"
"Why don't you want to see your mommy?"

"Because she doesn't come!" she says insistendy, fighting back her tears;
then, more quietly now, she repeats, "She doesn't come!"

"I see," Budd says. "If you had something you could say to your mom
right now, what would you say to her? Let's say that right now you can say
something to your mommy — what would you like to say?"

In a tone that is half angry, half hurt, Carol says quiedy, "How come
you never help me?"

"That's a good thing to say," Budd tells her.

Louder, more accusingly, Carol again asks, "How come you never help
me?" And she again bursts into tears.

"It's upsetting that she didn't help you, isn't it?" Budd asks.

"She never comes when the cats come," she says, her voice quavering.
"She doesn't come!" she sobs.

328

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

"Maybe sometimes the cats keep your mommy or your daddy from
coming in," Budd reassures her gently. "That can happen. That can happen
sometimes."

"My daddy comes," Carol says accusingly. "My mommy never comes."

"Okay," Budd says soothingly. "Okay. . . . Now, I want the sun to come
up and it's nice and bright in your room. You come out of the closet, what
does your mom say to you?"

After a pause, Carol says, "My mommy asks, 'What are you doing?' "

"And what do you say to your mommy?"

"That it's still cold."

"You don't tell her about the cats?" he asks.

"No," she says, and again her tone is somewhat accusing. "She doesn't
know about the cats."

"Well, why don't you tell her about the cats?"

"Because she can't help me," Carol says matter-of-facdy.

"But maybe if you did tell her, she'd be able to help you next time,"
Budd says, then asks, "Did you tell your daddy about the cats?"

"Yes, I tell my daddy."

I have an idea. I pass Budd a note on which I have written, "Ask Carol
if her father was there when the cats came." Budd reads my note and nods,
saying, "Okay." Then he turns back to Carol and says, "Let me hold your
hand. Now I want you to take a very deep breath again, a very deep
breath. Feel your lungs expanding. That's it. Just relax. A nice deep breath.
A nice deep breath. You're very relaxed. A nice deep breath." He pauses for
a moment, then asks her, "Does your ear still hurt after the cats did some-
thing?"

"A little bit," she replies.

"Okay, you're just very relaxed. I want you to see the sun coming in the
window. It's a nice day outside. It's summer, isn't it? Do you go out and have
some fun and play today?"

"No," she whispers. "It's raining out," she says.

"It's raining out?" Budd asks, surprised.

"Can't go outside."

"Well, it's going to be sunny some other day," Budd says, smiling.
"Okay, you're just very, very relaxed now. Let's have a very easy, deep breath.
Just relax. Just feel a very easy deep breath. . . .

"Let's move up now through that time you were in high school . . .
you're getting older . . . that time when you were getting ready to graduate
from high school and moving right up to the way you are today. There's still
one thing I'd like to ask about from that time when you were a little girl,
just looking back from the present, from as you are now as an adult: Do you

Postconference Interview: Carol and Alice

329

think when the cats came in that your daddy was there at all? Was your
daddy ever there?"

"Sometimes," Carol answers, now in an entirely normal grown-up
voice.

"He was there sometimes when the cats came?" Budd asks again. "Do
you think he saw the cats?"
"Yes," she whispers.

"How did he look when he saw the cats? Did he talk to you?"
"Noooo," she replies, still in a whisper.

"How did he look when you looked at him?" Budd asks. "Was he sit-
ting down?"

"Standing in the doorway." Her voice remains adult.

"Was he smiling? What kind of expression did he have on his face?"

"I don't know," Carol says, thinking. "He didn't have any expression."

"Do you think he actually saw the cats?"

"Yes."

"When they were near him, how big were the cats? Did they come up
to your daddy's knees? Were they taller?"
"Up to his ribs."

"They came up to his ribs," Budd says, nodding. "Did they have short
fur or long fur?"

"They didn't have any fur."

Budd looks backwards over his shoulder at me as if to say "Gotcha!"
Then he turns back to Carol and asks, "Did you ever see your daddy leave
with the cats? Did they ever talk and go out together? Go down the stairs or
anything? Or did they just stay in the room together?"

There is a long pause while Carol thinks over her answer. "He'd take me
out with him," she says. "He'd pick me up out of my bed. . . ."

"Okay," Budd says. "And what happened when he picked you up?"

"We'd just walk out."

"Did he speak to you and tell you where you were going?"
"No."

"Did you say anything to him?" Budd asks. "About what was happen-

ing?

"I couldn't say anything," Carol answers as if her inability to speak
should have been taken for granted.

"And when you walked out, where did you walk to? Down the stairs?"

"No, he'd carry me. He'd be walking through — " she says and stops.

"And when he was walking, let's see where you go."

"We just walk — " she starts to say and stops again. "We walk — we just
walk out — " Carol catches her breath.

330 CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

"Walk out into the hallway?"

"N0000!" Her voice is tightening up; she begins to breathe faster.
"In which direction do you go?"

"Just out!" Carol says insistently. "Out through the window!"

"Okay, you go out the window," Budd says calmly, gently. "And the
cats — are they with you?"

Carol does not answer. Instead she exhales sharply: " Whew!"

"What's outside the window when you go out? Is there a tree out there?
What's right out there?"

Carol, in her father's arms, is floated through her second-story bedroom
window over the roof of the back porch. Father and daughter glide down to
the ground between the house and the garage, where a large spacecraft is
waiting. The Small Grays, who Carol's screen memory had led her to believe
were cats, enter the craft first; four-year-old Carol and her father follow.
Carol's father lowers her until her feet touch the ground. As she is being
lowered, Carol is looking at her father, and she is frightened and upset to
see that he is crying.

There are other humans in the craft. Carol sees a number of children of
varying ages, some in pajamas, others in daytime clothing; she does not rec-
ognize any of them. She does not believe they are from her neighborhood.
There's one little girl who looks a bit like her sister, Mary, except that unlike
Mary, she has brown curly hair and is wearing "shorty pajamas," not a
nightgown. The children are just standing silently in place, as though wait-
ing for something to happen.

There are not as many grown-ups as there are children. Carol thinks
they might be the children's parents; she is not sure. The adults also are in
varying styles of dress — and undress: one of the women, Carol sees, is
naked; she feels embarrassed for her.

The adults, too, are standing around, not talking. If there are any Be-
ings present at this time, Carol does not see them.

The only furniture in the room to which they've been brought are sev-
eral white ironing-board-shaped tables. Like all the tables reported by ab-
ductees, the tables in this craft are of one piece, molded in such a way that
the central pedestal supporting them appears to flow into the floor. The
tabletops are empty.

While Carol looks on, some of the grown-ups and children leave the
room. Anxiously, Carol notices that they do not come back. She wants to
ask her father where they have gone, but she cannot speak. And then it is
their turn.

Carol and her father are floated along a circular corridor with a railing
that leads to a large, high-ceilinged room. In the center of the space stands

Postconference Interview: Carol and Alice 33 1

a row of tall transparent tubes; they rise like Plexiglas elevators from the
floor, too high up for Carol to see their tops. One by one each child is placed
within a tube. When it is Carol's turn, she can see her father through the
transparent wall outside the tube. He is again weeping; they would not let
him enter with her. And then, while she is standing alone in her pink night-
gown within the tube, it begins to snow — except it isn't snow. The sub-
stance showering down on her is dry and warm; and instead of sticking to
her, the flakes pass through her nightgown and her body. The shower stops
and a Being telepathically tells her to close her eyes.

I don't want to close my eyes! Carol protests.

Close your eyes!

It begins to snow again, a different substance.
Ow! It stings! It burns! Carol cries in her mind.
Close your eyes! Close your eyes!

She closes her eyes and the burning sensation goes away. This second
substance has a lemony smell and leaves her feeling sticky.

You can go now, she is told. Carol opens her eyes and sees her father
again. He does not look so frightened now.

Carol and her father are directed around the bank of elevator-like tubes
to the far end of the large room, then along another corridor with a railing
until they reach an exit tunnel, through which she can see perhaps a score
of other adults and children departing the craft. When Carol and her father
step back outside, it is cold and dark and misty. Her ear hurts, and when she
tries to walk she feels stiff and clumsy.

Carol and her father climb the steps to the back porch and door to the
house and walk inside. Her father takes her upstairs to her bedroom, where
Mary lies in her bed, still asleep.

As if by mutual agreement, Carol's father leads Carol to her closet, and
once she is inside her safe place, he closes the door. Immediately Carol be-
gins to feverishly stuff clothing into the chinks and cracks in the closet door.

After Carol's hypnosis we are sitting around Budd's studio having a drink
and some crackers. Carol is recalling how her father carried her into the
spacecraft. "I just remember when he leaned over to put me down he was
real stiff in the legs. In other words, he didn't take a step forward or bend.
He just put me down so that we were nose to nose, and I saw tears in his
eyes, which made me cry."

Budd turns to me and says, "You see, everything about that account
rings absolutely true for what a four-year-old kid and her helpless father
would have done had this happened. I mean, there isn't a false note there."

332

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

I tell him the part I find particularly chilling is the "cats" looking
through the window even though Carol was on the second floor. Carol
shudders at the memory. "Why don't I hate cats?" she asks. "I love cats! I
think they're wonderful creatures."

"Because they weren't cats!" Alice and Budd say together.

"Yes, but if I thought of them as cats," Carol says, "why wouldn't I for-
ever be associating cats with something that terrified me? Like my son,
John, loves cats, but he's been terrorized by what he thinks are cats staring
at him through the window."

"Cats were staring through the window at John, too?" I ask.

I did not know that Budd and Carol, during that earlier hypnosis ses-
sion in Washington, looked into memories Carol had of John's nightmares
when he was four years old and he and Carol were living in Savannah. She
remembered hearing her son scream; thinking he was having a bad dream,
she crossed the hall to his room. "There're all these cats around the house!"
the little boy cried to his mother. "We have to chase the cats away!"

Carol tried to explain to John that because there was latticework around
the bottom of the house, cats liked to go in there to get cool and to have kit-
tens. She explained that there was not much she could do about that; she
didn't want to kill them or set traps. She asked John why the cats so both-
ered him.

"Because they jump up on the windowsill at night," he replied, "and
they scare me. They peer in at me through the windows, stare at me all night
long, and it keeps me up."

Carol couldn't understand why the cats were such a big problem. It just
seemed silly to her at the time. But years later she still remembered how her
four-year-old son would wake up in the middle of the night crying that the
cats were looking at him through the window.

Under hypnosis with Budd, she was able to recall going to her son's bed-
room, that it had been brightly lit, and that she had seen the same "cats" in
his bedroom that had been in hers as a little girl. She remembered trying to
enter her son's bedroom but being unable to pass beyond the doorway. John
was sitting on the side of his bed screaming, " The cats! The CATS! Get rid of
the cats!"

The little boy was crying hysterically, but he couldn't move off of his
bed, and Carol could not move toward him. And then in her head she heard
one of the "cats" say, Tell him you can go with him.

She told John that it was okay, that she would be with him. And the two
of them were floated across the bed and through the window. Going
through the closed window, Carol said, "felt like passing through sheer cur-
tains, but there was not a solid feel to it. It was more like a heavy mist."

Postconference Interview: Carol and Alice

333

On board the craft John was put on a table that was too small for him;
and so, while Carol watched, the Grays floated him to a larger table.

The Doctor Being whom Carol had most recently seen during her West
Virginia state park abduction was standing at her right.

Why are you doing this to my son? she asked him.

/ want to examine him, the Being replied.

I don't want you to hurt him, she said. I want to take him home now.
But he's not yours!

Yes, he is, Carol insisted. He's MINE!

He's only partly yours, the Doctor told her. He's ours.

The Beings took blood and skin samples from John and then permitted
the little boy and his mother to return home.

The next morning, when she asked John about the nightmare, he
replied that he hated the house because of all the cats.

Carol told him they would get rid of the cats.

"The cats are always having to take stuff back," John said.

"How do you know that?" Carol asked.

"Because," the four-year-old answered, "I'll have to go back there and
stay someday, and I don't want to go."
"Oh, that sounds silly!" Carol said.

"It sounds silly," John agreed, then added matter-of-factly, "but it's
true.

John's daughter is Stacy, the little four-year-old whose drawing of the
spaceship in which she traveled with her friend Nu Carol had shown at the
conference.

CHAPTER XV

Postconference Interview

Brenda, Erica, Terry, and Linda Cortile —
Abductee Support Group Meeting at
Budd Hopkins's Studio

Budd Hopkins has arranged for Carol and Alice and I to attend one of his
support group meetings after dinner that Friday evening. Present are several
other women who have come to Budd for help in understanding and deal-
ing with their abduction experiences; among them Linda Cortile.

I recognize another member of the support group from the conference:
Brenda, the commercial artist who went public about her experiences on
several television shows and sells "alien T-shirts" of her own design. She is
forty, with dark, touseled hair and an attractive, somewhat pouty face.

According to Brenda, when she was twenty she was abducted from the
rooftop of her Bronx home and brought by a sixty-foot-diameter circular
disc to its underground base in the Southwest. When parked at the base,
half of the disc was hidden beneath the surface of a lake; the other half was
buried beneath the sand. The entrance to the base was through a camou-
flaged shed near the edge of the lake. The shed, in turn, led to a tunnel
which descended to a hangar for the craft. While at the base, Brenda tells
us, she saw hybrids, Grays, and Nordics. The Grays and the Nordics, she
noticed, did not communicate with each other at all.

Erica is another of Budd's abductees. She is in her early thirties, has
black, curly hair, a fine-featured, pretty face, and works as a designer in a
fashionable New York clothing store. Erica believes her family — not just her
direct line but uncles and cousins as well — has been involved in abductions
for generations.

Not long ago, in her Eighty-fifth Street apartment, Erica tells us, she had
an abduction experience after which she had a faint conscious recall of having

Postconference Interview: Brenda, Erica, Terry, and Linda Cortile 3 3 5

embraced her eighty-seven-year-old grandfather, even though at that time he
was supposedly in Florida. So several days after the abduction she telephoned
him and asked if "anything weird" had happened to him that week. Accord-
ing to Erica, her grandfather said, "Why are you asking me that?"

"Well, Tuesday morning," Erica asked, "did anything happen?"

"Yes!" he said. "I was having a dream where I saw three grotesque crea-
tures. It was like I was watching television."

"Gramps, what did they look like?"

"They looked Asiatic," he said. "They had big, slanting eyes."

Erica asked him exactly when this dream had occurred. It coincided
with the time of her abduction.

"So, I'm pretty sure it's been happening to him," Erica says, "because he
told me when he was a little boy he had had a lot of weird experiences that
had been telepathic and all that."

Brenda tells us she met a woman abductee in Florida who reported that
in 1888, her great-great-great-grandfather, while living in Texas, had been re-
turning home along a dirt road, shotgun in hand, from a visit to his fiancee's
isolated prairie home and had seen a bright light moving toward him in the
sky. According to the story, he had continued walking as the light came
closer and closer, and then the next thing he knew he was sitting on a rock
a dozen yards from where he had been, and his shotgun had been fired.

"Now, today we would understand it as a UFO story," Brenda said. "But
back then, they probably thought it was the spirit world or something."

There are seven women in all attending the support group meeting: in
addition to Carol and Alice, Erica and Brenda, and Linda Cortile, there are
two others. Because those two seem a little hesitant to have me there, I ask
them what it is like dealing with someone who is sympathetic but doesn't
necessarily believe them.

Erica answers instead. "It doesn't bother me if you don't believe me," she
says. "I'm going through this, and I have my friends around me who are
going through this. We have each other. What bothers me is that every day
at work I walk by one of the self-help offices on the way to the bathroom —
one of those offices where if you need help with AIDS, or this or that, there
are counselors. But there's nobody there for us. When we get abducted,
there are no 911 calls we can make. I feel like we're ostracized. We're like
silent victims, because we can't really outwardly discuss what we're going
through. And when you're on the subway and you're looking at those help
posters for drugs or alcoholism — 'When you're ready to get off your high
horse, come see us' — well, there's nobody we can see except Budd. Budd's
our lifeline, because he brings people together in our support group meet-
ings, where we can talk."

336 CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

Terry, one of the two women who have not yet spoken, nods at what
Erica is saying. "There's a tremendous sense of betrayal involved," Terry
adds.

"Why 'betrayal'?" I ask.

"Because for the rest of your life you're left with the feeling that there's
nothing out there that is safe," Terry replies. "There's no one you can trust,
and there's nowhere you can go. As Erica said, there's no abductee hotline,
and unless you're one of the lucky ones who end up in a support group like
this, you're just out there alone!'

"All we have is each other," Brenda agrees. "And you have to try to keep
supporting each other no matter how difficult it is. You have to stay tight as
a group, because you also have to understand how to deal with it when new
people come in, so we can help them. And there's going to be new people
all the time."

"Okay," I say, "let me try to come at this from a different direction.
When did you begin to suspect that what was happening to you wasn't a
fantasy, a hallucination, a dream, or any of a number of those excuses one
presumably makes to oneself rather than believe what is really going on?
What convinced you it was real?"

"When I saw the aliens consciously for the first time," Linda Cortile an-
swers. "When I saw them in my room at the foot of my bed. Before that, as
far as I was concerned, you always have the doubt that no matter how good
you may think hypnosis is, there's the possibility that past dreams were com-
ing out, and that that was why I was seeing all those weird creatures. But in
1989, that time when I saw with my own eyes the aliens standing at the foot
of my bed, I wasn't asleep. I know what I saw. They were there! 'It was real."

"I had physical traces of an abduction," Brenda says, "but that didn't
make it real. I had flashbacks of seeing Grays, but that didn't make it real.
None of the memories that I had made it real. What made it real for me was
abductee Betty Andreasson describing in her book the shoes the aliens had
put on her feet. They were made of some sort of clear element, glass or plas-
tic of some kind, and were three inches high. And the same shoes were put on
me! They had some way of staying on your foot; I don't know if it was a strap
or something. But Andreasson described this as some way of monitoring you
around the ship, and that's exactly what they had put on my feet. When I later
read this in her book, I burst into tears. It was the sort of small detail that
makes you think, My God, how can two people have the exact same image?"

Erica had a similar experience. She dreamed she was back in her house
with her father when the living-room door swung open and standing in the
lower left-hand corner of the doorway was a little white gorilla. It was a
dream so vivid she compared it to watching a movie. After a hypnotic re-

Postconference Interview: Brenda, Erica, Terry, and Linda Cortile 3 3 7

gression session with Budd, she began to have flashbacks, one after another,
in a constant stream, all involving her father. So in an attempt to come to
some sort of understanding about what had happened, Erica went to visit
her father in Brooklyn. Her father, surprised to see her, asked Erica what she
was doing home.

"Dad," Erica said, "I had a dream and you were in it. We were in the
living room, and the door swung open — "

"And the living room door swung open — " her father was saying.

" — and standing in the left-hand corner," Erica and her father said si-
multaneously, "was a little white gorilla."

The two of them just stared at each other. How can this be? Erica was
thinking.

"How could that be?" her father asked.

Erica is positive that she and her father could not have had the same
dream.

But what made the abduction experience especially real to Erica was a
physical trace. Erica has a condition because of which cuts do not heal prop-
erly; she scars easily. The year before, she cut her thumb badly enough that
she was rushed to St. Vincent's Hospital, where the wound was stitched up.
And although the doctor, at the time, was very pleased with the suturing job
he had done, the resulting scar became coarse and puckered. Shortly there-
after, according to Erica, she was abducted from her Manhattan apartment.
She remembers being on a table in an alien craft, where the Beings, she tells
us, "cut open my leg and it was bleeding. I was conscious, and I saw this
with my own eyes: The creature put his hand over my leg and the red stuff
inside the cut was absorbed, and the white stuff, the plasma, was left on his
fingertips. I was looking at this as if in shock, and then the wound in my leg
kind of sealed up.

"When I awoke the next morning," Erica continues, "there was a very
fine, hairline scar on my leg. And this kind of scar wasn't possible! All my
life since I was a baby I have had scars: from falling downstairs, from falling
off my bicycle on concrete. So when I saw this smooth, thin scar on my leg
I went into an immediate panic, because I knew there was no way a scar
could be like that on my leg, since I don't heal that way! Therefore I knew
the experience had to have been real. And then you have to deal with this.
You know you were taken in the middle of the night. But there's no one to
turn to. It's very hard!"

Recently Erica went to a dermatologist and asked him if there was any-
thing he could do about the coarse scar on her thumb. He said he couldn't,
that that was the way the scar was going to look. So she showed him the
hairline scar on her leg and asked, "Well, what about this?"

338 CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OPTHE FOURTH KIND

"That's a very good job!" he said admiringly. "Who did that?"
What could she tell him?

Toward the end of the support group meeting, Brenda tells us about an
incident that occurred only a month before. She was sitting alone at an out-
door cafe near Battery Park City one evening when, she says, she saw a Small
Gray approaching her. The Being's form was hazy, silhouetted as if backlit.
Not until the Gray reached her table did he become completely visible.
Then he told her, We have to go.

"Okay," Brenda said.

She rose from her table to follow the Being and suddenly found herself
being flown over the Hudson River. It was dark, cold; they were flying very
fast, and in the moonlight she could barely make out the waves of the river
far below. The black water terrified her. Twenty years earlier, she had been
in a boat on the Hudson at night with friends. They had all been smoking
pot and thought it would be fun to take a swim. So she had jumped over-
board with the others and had immediately panicked when she went under.
She surfaced like a cat who'd been tossed in a pond: clawing and howling to
get back into the boat. Flying over the Hudson in the dark brought back the
memory of having been momentarily trapped beneath that black water,
and, frightened, she clung to the Small Gray to keep from falling.

According to Brenda, the Being guided her to a huge, unlit UFO hov-
ering high over the river. She did not even see the craft until she was directly
underneath it, and could discern its large, dark shape above her, and within
that darkness, a somewhat lighter open inner circle of gray. The Being, with
Brenda still clinging to him, was sucked up into the interior of the ship, and
once they were inside, there was light enough for her to look at the alien
who had been holding her.

"I just sort of patted him," Brenda tells us, "like, 'Oh, thank God! I
thought I was going to fall into that river!' I was much more afraid of the
water than that alien, because I knew he didn't represent my death as much
as the water did. So even though I should have blamed him for abducting
me, I was very grateful he had helped me across the water. Of course, when
I went through the ship a little bit, and other things happened, a few of the
other Grays I resented; but this particular one ..." Brenda pauses for a mo-
ment, remembering, and then she adds, "The fact that I would like this
Gray was very uncharacteristic."

CHAPTER XVI

Postconference Interview

Carol and Alice — Second Hypnosis Session
at Budd Hopkins's Studio

Saturday morning, in preparation for her hypnosis session with Budd, Alice
explains the background of her Tallahassee trip, the one in which she ap-
peared to have missing time.

Alice tells Budd how she spent the night before the trip in a motel
outside Tuskegee, Alabama, then the next morning had met with the
dean, various professors, and students of the Tuskegee Institute. She did
not finish until around four, and left for Tallahassee about four-thirty.
They had told her at the college the trip would take three, maybe four
hours.

Alice was stopped for speeding just after going through a small town in
Georgia. She had been doing 85 mph. "There was nobody on the highway
and I was late," she explained.

She said she thought it was around seven-thirty when she was stopped
by the cop and around ten-thirty when she checked into the motel. The
three-to-four-hour journey to Tallahassee had taken roughly six hours, al-
though, as Alice pointed out, it had not all been driving. She thinks she may
have stopped at a fast-food restaurant on the edge of Tallahassee.

"So we do have a time problem," Budd says, and makes a note.

"Unless they were talking superhighways and I took backroads," Alice
says. "That's what I assumed was the explanation at the time."

"Yes, but if you were cruising along at eighty-five, you certainly weren't
lingering on the back country roads. 'Dawdling' does not spring to the lips
as a description of your driving to Florida," Budd says with a smile.

Alice checked into the hotel in Tallahassee and took a cold shower. It
was an odd thing for her to do, she admitted, but she thought she was doing
it because, as she said, she "just felt so horrible."

"Why not a warm shower?" Budd asks.

340

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

"I don't know."

"When was the last time you took a cold shower?"

"Never," Alice replies. "I was just so hot. The motel was hot. And the
whole next day I felt weird, half sick to my stomach." She was convinced,
she explains, that she was coming down with the flu.

Alice had felt very disoriented when she checked in. She had pushed the
elevator button to take a ride up to her floor, but the elevator door had
seemed to open and shut too fast for her to get in. The next time the door
slid open, she pushed her briefcase in to hold it, and the closing door
crushed the briefcase. She had a sense that she wasn't moving quickly
enough, she says, that "everything was in slow motion."

There follows a discussion of what else Alice might like to look into
during the hypnosis session. She reports that she had nightmares as a child,
but no idea of what they were about.

Alice speaks about her childhood: how she felt abandoned, that her par-
ents didn't love her, and how at night she would cry herself to sleep. She
talks about her very authoritarian career-military father who would beat her
with a belt or paddle.

"Were there any fears or phobias that got focused when you were little?"
Budd asks.

And Alice answers, "None."

I thought Alice would disclose her suspicions that her father had raped
her during a fishing trip when she was twelve, but she doesn't mention it.

"What about fears or phobias now?" Budd asks.

"Children," she says. "Small ones. Once they get bigger, it's okay."
("When I was in college, I realized I hated children," Alice told me that last
night in Boston. "I couldn't stand them! I can't be around them!")

"If someone handed you a two-month-old baby to hold, what would
happen?" Budd asks.

Alice sighs. "I don't think I'd drop it, but I wouldn't take it."

"You couldn't handle it, okay," Budd says, making a note on his yellow
pad. "Let's say some friend hands you a baby to hold wrapped up — for
whatever reason, maybe to put money into a parking meter. But, looking at
the baby, what would be your feelings?"

Without hesitation Alice answers, "Revulsion. Fear."

"Did you ever think you were pregnant?"

"Besides last summer, only once or twice," she says. "Once in high
school I thought I was pregnant. My period was a couple of weeks late, and
we sort of had a celebration when it finally came. And I remember one time,
probably ten years ago, when I went through that again and I thought, Oh
my God, I'm pregnant! I can't handle this. I could have been pregnant, but

Postconference Interview: Carol and Alice

341

I wasn't. That's when I went and got my tubes tied. I said I'm not even going
to take the chance of that anymore.

"But what's weird," Alice continues, "is I always thought it would be
neat to be pregnant, to go through the experience, because I wanted to have
the experience. But I didn't want the baby when it came out!\ just thought it
would be neat to find out what pregnancy would be like."

"You've never had an abortion?" Budd asks.

"Never. Why?"

"Because people would say ambivalent feelings about a child could
come from deliberately having an abortion or something like that," Budd
explains.

"No, that's absolutely clear that never happened," Alice says firmly.

Budd makes a note. "Let's get specific about the babies — children," he
says. "You start with a newborn little baby and range through its really help-
less times, then a year old, then it walks, and at two years it starts to talk and
then up through school. Is there any period here where the revulsion is
stronger than other periods?"

"When they're about that high," Alice says, holding her hand about
three feet above the floor.

"So that would be like a two-and-a-half-year-old?"

"Walking around," Alice says, and shudders. "There's a day-care center
in our building, and the children get on the elevator with me sometimes."

"So 'toddler' would be more accurate," Budd notes. "How about a new-
born?"

"It's not as bad."

"I'd really like to look into this phobia, because when you have some-
thing this powerful," Budd says, "it can cause all kinds of problems in the
real world, because you're going to run into friends with babies."

"I know," Alice says. "I avoid them. If my friends have kids, I still — "

"You do well with Stacy," Carol interjects.

"She's bigger," Alice explains. After a child reaches about four and a half
feet tall, Alice tells us, she seems to be able to handle his or her presence. But
when Stacy was small, Alice would have to get out of the house. Even now,
when the neighbors' little children come to the horse farm, Alice escapes.

Budd asks Alice, "When you have that sense of revulsion and fear, do
you think of yourself in any way different from what you are now? Do you
see yourself as another child? When you have that shock and fear, does it
flash into anything in your life that suddenly you're a little kid, a twelve-
year-old girl, a teenager or anything?"

"No," Alice says. "In fact, when I was going with this guy in high
school, senior year, we were talking about getting married, having a dozen

342 CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

kids, the whole marriage bit, and doing everything you're supposed to. And
I was okay with that. But at some point in college . . ."

"So you didn't have it when you were little?"

"No," Alice says. "It came after high school."

Alice explains that in college she studied experimental psychology be-
cause she thought she wanted to work with mentally and physically dis-
turbed children. She actually did work with disturbed children for about six
months, then found she couldn't do it any longer. She just became too
upset.

Thinking that there may be a possible link between working with dis-
turbed children and the onset of her phobia, Budd asks which were the most
memorable of the children she encountered. Alice said one was a fourteen-
year-old girl with a five-year-old's mentality. Alice and other students would
go to the parents' house to work with the child. They would have her crawl,
patterning her to try to open up the neural pathways.

Another was an autistic child who was "completely blank," Alice says.
"There was just no reaching her. She was probably four or five."

And then there was a third child, who, Alice says, was "sort of autistic
but also violent. She was also four or five, but tiny — and very strong. When
she went into one of her violent fits, it took several people to hold her
down."

Budd asks Alice to imagine the first autistic child in the studio with us,
"What would she be doing?"

The child would be "curled up in the corner," Alice says. "She would be
facing out but totally absorbed."

"Did you feel sorry for her, or afraid of her?" Budd asks.

"I don't know about then, but right now what I'm feeling is that she was
safe," Alice replies.

"Because she was closed off?"

"Yes." Alice thinks for a moment, then says, "I did some strange stuff
when I was in college. We had encounter groups, and I remember one of
the things we decided to play is that someone would be an autistic child.
The rest would draw him out and get him back into stuff. I got to be the
autistic child. It was so safe" Alice says, and she begins to cry. "I didn't want
to come out! I eventually did, of course, but it felt so very safe."

"So, in a certain sense, you envied that child?" Budd asks.

"Yes."

Alice explains that the little girl was safe because she always had some-
one there to take care of her, to try to draw her out, to get her to commu-
nicate; but, Alice tells us, she quit working with the child because she
became too emotionally involved.

Postconference Interview: Carol and Alice

343

Budd determines that Alice's hesitation about holding a child has noth-
ing to do with her fear of being an inadequate protector. "I just don't want
the child close to me," Alice explains.

"Because they might do what?" I ask.

"I don't know."

Budd makes a note on his yellow pad, then asks Alice, "What do you
think about when you think of the child being revolting?"

"Just that I've just got to get away," Alice replies.

"It's the child in totality," Budd says, making another note. "In your
worst-case scenario, how does the child behave?"

"The child clings to me. Grabs me around the legs."

"Do several children up the ante of fear more than just one?"

"Yes. If there were like six, I'd . . ." Alice's voice trails off, and she shud-
ders again.

"If a child grabbed you around the legs, could you just reach down and
pull the child's arms off you? What would you do?"
I d run away.

"But what if the child were hanging on?" Budd asks.
Alice looks stricken. "I'd kick him away. I'd try not to hurt him,
but . . ."

Budd takes some more notes, then asks Alice if there is anything she
would like to ask him.

"No. I trust you," she says, then adds, "But I'm scared."

"I know," Budd says gently. "Just assume at the outset that all sorts of
horrible things are going to emerge, and tell yourself, 'Okay, screw it. So we
have a lot of horrible stuff and then we have lunch.' So scarrout with the as-
sumption 'Okay, what am I going to learn? I'm going to learn I got picked
up, and this and that happened.' You've read the books. . . ."

"I've read them all," Alice says, nodding.

"So just imagine that the very worst you've ever read happened. So
what? Here you are still."

"Yes, that's what I keep telling myself."
"Okay," Budd says.

It is decided that Alice's safe place, like Carol's, will be a rose garden.
Budd urges Alice to avoid trying to analyze what would take place under
hypnosis. He tells her to "be a reporter, not a pundit."

The studio lights are dimmed; Alice is settled onto the black couch,
covered with the blanket, and made comfortable.

The hypnosis session begins. Ten minutes later Alice is comfortable, re-
laxed . . . peaceful, relaxed. For the next few moments Budd takes her into
the safe place: "I want you to smell the beautiful air filled with the odor of

344 CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

the roses. I want you to feel the warmth of the sun on your skin, the gentle
breeze that keeps you at a perfect temperature. I want you to look up at the
clear, blue sky. I just want you to enjoy with all of your senses that beauti-
ful, beautiful rose garden, just for the next few moments, in silence. . . ."

After a long pause Budd tells Alice they will return to that rose garden
at another time. And then he puts her into deeper and deeper sleep. "You're
feeling comfortable . . . relaxed," he tells her. "You're feeling peaceful ... re-
laxed. ..."

Budd takes Alice back to Florida in her mind. "And in this very relaxed
state, with your mind so alert and so clear," he tells her, "you can see yourself
as you were a little over a year ago in the summer when you were on your
drive around the South visiting colleges. You've got that rental car and you've
been at Tuskegee. It's getting on late in the day, in the afternoon, and it's time
to go "

Budd allows Alice time to reach that time and place in her memory, and
then he says, "I want you to get the feeling of being in your car now, of get-
ting in your car. Things are packed in the back and you're all set and you
start off. It's late afternoon; you get the feeling of the hum of the engine of
the car, driving along, heading to Tallahassee.

"You're driving along, and various things happen on this trip," Budd
tells her. "There are various interruptions, things that were unexpected. We
know at one point there's a police officer. So there are some things that hap-
pened.

"I want you to get the feeling of driving on," Budd repeats, then asks
Alice to describe what the landscape looks like. "You can speak whenever
you like," he tells her.

"It's farms," Alice says in almost a whisper. "And it's very poor. It's
peanut fields . . . peanut fields. There're some flat fields."

"Just look out the window as you drive along. ..."

"Trees. Peach trees ..."

"As you drive along, everything looks kind of typical, but maybe at
some point you notice something that seems a little different. See if you no-
tice anything different. It could be any number of things. ..."

After a pause Alice says softly, "It's just boring."

"Boring? Uh-hm," Budd says, smiling over his shoulder at me. "Just
keep looking as you drive along. . . . We know for sure there was at least one
surprise on this trip. If there's one surprise, there could be more surprises.
Something that breaks the monotony. I'm going to count to three now, and
my hand is going to come down on your hand, and it will feel safe and it
will feel nice. When I count to three, you'll get that first inkling of some
kind of surprise or shock. My hand's coming down on yours.

Postconference Interview: Carol and Alice

345

"One," Budd says. "You're driving along . . . something's going to in-
terrupt the monotony. . . . Two, right on the edge now . . . three!"

There is a long silence, and then Alice whispers, "It's like a crown of
light. . . ." And a moment later she adds, "Like fire."

"Like a fire, um-hm," Budd says. "Keep looking at it."

"Like a gas stove burner," Alice whispers.

"Is this off in a field somewhere?" Budd asks.

There is wonder in Alice's voice as she answers, "Yes!"

"Where is it in the field?"

"I don't know — it's on my right."

"Um-hm. Just keep looking at it."

After a brief pause, Alice says, "Gone."

"It's gone? Do you mean you passed it by?"

"No, it just went away."

"Is there any traffic on the road?" Budd asks her. "Other people who
might notice things?"

"No," Alice says. "I'm all alone."

"Do you see road signs, or where you are?"

"Stop sign," she says. "I turn right."

There is another long pause, and Budd says, "You're just driving
along — let's just see what you see. Just report what you're seeing. A little
town?

"No. Nut trees. Big trees."
"How're you feeling?" Budd asks her.
"Pretty good," Alice responds.
"Bored, maybe?"
"Yes, it's a long drive."

"A long drive," Budd repeats. "And you're driving along. . . . How's the
car performing? Are you having any car trouble?"

"It's okay," she says, then adds matter-of-factly, "I have a feeling it's
stopped."

"What's stopped?" Budd asks, leaning forward closer to Alice.

"The car. I can't see it. I just feel it. . . ."

"Did it stop with a jerk, or did it just slow down gradually?"

"Gradually."

"All of your senses are extremely alert. Your sense of feeling — "

" Cold!" Alice says, shivering.

"You're cold? Is the air conditioner on in the car?"

"I don't think so," Alice says with a sigh.

"Tell me what you're feeling," Budd says. "Your body is very, very aware
of anything it feels. It felt a little cold. ..."

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CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

After a moment Alice whispers, "Waiting."

"Waiting? And how are you waiting?"

"I'm sitting there."

"Is the car moving or stopped?"

"Its stopped."

"Have you pulled off the side of the road, or are you in one of the
lanes?"

"Sort of half in the lane and half on the shoulder."

"Is this the main route you were on when you made the right turn?"

"No," Alice says. "Its a little road."

"Why did you make your right turn at the stop sign?" Budd asks.
His question doesn'tseem to concern Alice. "I just turned right," she ex-
plains.

"Is this a smaller route than the one you were on?"
"Yes."

"So, you're just kind of waiting," Budd says. "Now, I'm going to put my
hand back on your hand. My hand's coming down, and that's a sign that it's
okay to go along with this and see what you're waiting for. Whoever or
whatever you're waiting for is going to show up. Or it won't show up, it
won't happen, in which case you'll just leave," Budd tells her.

Alice inhales sharply.

"What's happening?" Budd asks.

"There's somebody at the window!" Alice says, surprised.

"At the window of your car? Um-hm. Is this on the driver's side?"

'Yes."

"Okay. A quick glimpse. Just as though your eyelids don't even com-
pletely open. When I count to three just through your eyelids a quick little
look and see who's there. One, getting ready to take a quick look . . .
two . . . three! Quick look and close your eyes. Who's at the window?"

"I don't know!" Alice says, concentrating. "It's a long face."

"A long face," Budd repeats. "Um-hm."

Alice's breath quickens. "It's not a person!" she says tensely.

"Tell me about the person."

Alice inhales sharply and cries out.

"You're okay," Budd says soothingly. "You're with me. Feel my hands.
Tighten up on my hands when you need to. Tell me what's happening,
Alice. You're just a reporter. You're just going to look. It was a long time ago.
Tell me what's happening."

After a slight pause she says, "I'm supposed to go with him."

"Does he tell you that?"

"No. I just know"

Postconference Interview: Carol and Alice

347

Alice takes a deep breath and exhales.

"Now this is the South," Budd says. 'You could have been seeing a lot
of black people. Is this a black person?"
"No," Alice whispers. "This one's gray."

"Gray. Right," Budd says without emotion. "So, let's just see now. Do
you lock the door of the car?"
"No."

"What do you do?"

"I get out. . . ." Alice whispers. And then, with an exasperated sigh, she
asks, " Why am I doing this?"

"Let's worry about that later," Budd tells her. "When you get out, what
do you see around you?"

"Lots of trees. . . . They're big trees. They're not peach trees. They're
big."

"When you get out do you stand next to this person?" Budd asks her.
"Yes."

"Is he a big person?"

"Yes," she says, again inhaling deeply. "But we sort of float away!" Alice
exhales slowly.

"Let's allow that floating feeling to happen."

"That's weirdr Alice says with a mixture of apprehension and wonder.
"It's . . . it's nice!"

"Where are you floating to? Let's see where you are going."
"I don't know," Alice says. "I'm upright."
"Okay, let's see where you float to."

"Octagon! Sharp sides. Each corner. Ooooh!" she cries. "There are lights
there."

"On the thing that looked like a gas light?" Budd asks.
"Yes. Like a gas burner. . . . There's a thing on the bottom," she says and
pauses. "A whole octagon! With a hole."

"Do you mean there's a hole in the middle of the octagon?"

" Yes!" Alice says with wonderment. "But it's like a flange down there."

"Just make your eyes a camera and look at it. So, what happens next?"

"We go straight up," Alice whispers. "Inside . . ."

There is a pause.

"What's happening?" Budd asks her.
"Just standing there."
"Where are you standing?"
"White room — ooooh!"
"What's happening?"
"Squiggles."

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CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

"What do you mean, 'squiggles'?"

"On the wall or something. Squiggles. Like on a black screen."

"Anything present except squiggles?"

"Softness," Alice whispers.

"You can draw that for me later."

"You can't draw softness," Alice tells him.

"Well, you can draw the squiggles."

"Okay," she says pleasandy.

'Are you alone in this room?" Budd asks. "Or is the person with you
who took you in?"

"Yes, sort of," she says, and she begins breathing anxiously. "Eyes."
"What?"

"Eyes! 'More eyes ..."

There is another long pause.

"Where do you see these eyes now?" Budd asks her.

"Around."

"Um-hm," Budd says. He is leaning forward over Alice, cupping his
chin in his hand.

"Shorter eyes . . ." she says.

"Are there a lot of people standing around looking at you?"

Alice takes a deep breath. "Yes," she responds. "There're three or four of
them," she says, exhaling.

"Let's see," Budd says. "Are they standing there facing you, or are they
to the left or the right?"

"There's one over there," Alice says, pointing to her left side, "and
there's two over there." She points over her left shoulder.

"Okay, we're going to get a sense of what they're going to do," Budd
says. "Did anybody tell you what this was all about? Do you ask them what's
happening?"

"Why'd you do this?" Alice asks, apparently of the aliens.
"What did they say?"

"We need you." Alice responds. Then she asks, whispering, " Why?" Her
tone of voice becomes both exasperated and sad: "You don't need to know!"

There is a long pause and then Alice asks, seemingly of the aliens, "Can
I go home now?"

"You want to go 'home' now — you mean back to the car?" Budd asks.
A huge sigh escapes Alice's lips. "Wherever," she says. "They don't think
so. So I can't."

There is a pause.

"What's happening?" Budd asks her. "Are you still standing there?"
"I'm lying down."

Postconference Interview: Carol and Alice

349

"Um-hm."

"Weird," she says, then cries out in surprise, "Ooooooh! That's a
strange-looking one."

"What's that one look like?" Budd asks.

"He looks more like a dragonfly. Something above his eyes," she says,
and sighs.

"Does he have wings?"

"No. He doesn't have wings. . . . He looks mad."
"He looks mad," Budd repeats. "Does he say anything to make you
think that?"

"Nooo," Alice whispers.

"Okay, this is what I want you to do now while whatever this all is is
happening. I don't want you to look. I want you to keep your eyes closed
and not look at anybody. But I want you to know, Alice, that your body is
extremely sensitive; it has its own memories that can feel, for instance, the
surface that you're lying on. What that surface feels like. Your body can feel
the sense of the fabric, whatever's next to your skin — clothing, a T-shirt,
whatever you're wearing. What are you wearing?"

"Nothing."

"Nothing," Budd repeats in a flat tone.
"It's cold!" Alice says, and shivers.

Alice curls up on her right side, burrowing into the blanket.

"Your body remembers exactly what it felt," Budd says gently. "You're
lying there, and you're cold, and you don't have anything on. This is what
we're going to do. We're going to start with your feet and we're going to
move up from your feet systematically through your whole body and see
what your body's memories are. Starting with your feet. What do your feet
feel? Concentrate your attention down there; let's see if your feet feel differ-
ent in any way. If they feel any of those things or if they feel normal."

"My heels are cold," Alice says, taking another deep breath.

Budd gradually focuses Alice's attention away from her feet to her an-
kles, to her calves, her knees, her thighs. "Okay," he says, "Now, being very
systematic, you're lying there and we're moving up to your female parts, to
your genitals. What do you feel in that area that feels different in any way?
Or does that part of your body feel normal?"

"It feels tight," Alice says. She is still lying on her right side, facing
Budd. "Cramps," she says, almost wonderingly. " Oooooh!" She draws her
knees up to her chest in pain. "Owwwww!"

"Is this pain in your abdomen, or is this down lower?"

"Down lower," Alice says, now writhing in pain.

"In your genital area and all that?"

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CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

"Yessss!" she hisses in obvious discomfort. "Cramps!"

"Now your body has very, very good memories and can sense what's
happening," Budd tells her. "It can sense what's causing this sort of feeling.
What are you sensing in that part of your body?"

"Pain," Alice cries. "Pain! ... Oh! OMM'OhhhHHHH!"

"Pain. Inside you?"

Alice is moaning in agony.

"Okay, we're going to turn that pain down," Budd says soothingly.
"That pain volume is set up pretty high. It's a volume control, and it's set
way up at a seven on that pain. And we're going to put a hand on that vol-
ume button and turn it down now to a six . . . turning it down . . . it's eas-
ing off. Turning it down to a five . . . it's still present, it's still definitely there,
but it's easing off. Down to a four now . . . turning it down ..."

When Budd reaches two, Alice sighs with relief.

"Now, when this is happening," Budd continues, "is there any move-
ment involved, or is it still? What does it seem like? What would cause
something like this?"

" Ow w ttw/Terrible pain," Alice says and cries out again.

"Let's keep that dial turned down now. We're not going to let that come
back up. But it's still present. What would you do to duplicate that effect?"

"Ohhhhhh," Alice moans.

"You said this was the vaginal area — would it seem that there's some-
thing inside you? Or is this something on the outside? What kind of — ?"

"No, it's like everything was j ust squeezed into a little tiny knot!" Alice
groans.

"As if there's pressure again from the outside?"

'Yes . . . outside, but inside, too."

"Is it steady, or is it intermittent? Does it come and go?"

"It comes and goes."

"Is it connected to a feeling of some kind of movement?" Budd asks.
"Or is it just a still presence that's affecting things?"

Suddenly we hear Alice's horrified whisper: "Oh, my God!"
"Is it happening again?" Budd asks worriedly.
Alice has burst into tears; she cannot answer.

"Tell me what you're feeling now," Budd says gently. "You're okay — my
hand is on your head now. Feel the warmth of my hand on your forehead.
It feels much better. Just tell me what's happening. Tell me like a good, clear
reporter — tell me what's happening."

"/ feel like I just had a baby!" Alice cries, her voice breaking.

"You feel like you just had a baby."

"I wasn't pregnant!" she sobs.

Postconference Interview: Carol and Alice

35 1

"It's okay. You're okay now," Budd says gently. "Feel my hand; my
hand's on your forehead. Feel it? That feels much better. What was that feel-
ing like? Did you feel that something passed through you?"

"Yesssf Tears are streaming down Alice's cheeks.

"Something came from the inside and went out?"

"Yesss. The pain's gone."

"Good," Budd says. "Now, just to quickly — "

"That can't be!" Alice cries in disbelief.

I look over at Carol; she, too, is in tears.

"Don't worry about that," Budd says calmly. "Let's not even worry. We
don't know what this experience is, and we're not going to try to guess. This
is what I want you to do: Probably at the time, you opened your eyes just a
little bit to just glance down and see what was happening. When you glance
down, do you see anything? Just let yourself look down in that direction and
see if you see anything."

"It's tiny. It's very tiny," Alice says, with a hint of revulsion.

"How tiny is it?" Budd asks.

"About the size of a pear . . . Ohhhh!"

"And what happens to this pearlike thing which you're seeing?"
"They're taking it away," she says, so matter-of-factly I am surprised.
"Do you at any time look at it as it's being taken away?" Budd asks her.
"Can you see what it seems to resemble?"
"It's pink and wrinkled," Alice whispers.

"Does it have appendages? I mean, you feel like you had a baby. Does
it look like it has — ?"

"It's very short. Real short . . . little. Tiny."
"Do you hear any tiny cries from the — ?"
"No."

"Okay. So it's taken out. Now, how do you feel? Do you feel some re-
laxation that it's gone? You feel much better that it's gone?"
" Yes!" Alice says with obvious relief.

"Okay. Good. ... Do they say anything to you about this?"
After the slightest of pauses, Alice answers, "They say it's theirs."
"It's theirs?" Budd repeats. "Do they say that to you?"
"Yes."

"Do you ask how this came about? What do you say to them?"
"I say, 'How can it be? . . . Where did it come from?' "
"Alice, this is what I want you to do for me right now," Budd says. "Let's
just float slowly away from that experience, and this is what I want you to
do, because your body is extremely sensitive with its own memories. Let's
go back some months before this. I want you to feel your body very, very

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CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

subtly and intensely. If you were pregnant at some point — we don't know
whether you were — but if you were, your body is going to know that a seed
was inserted into it somehow to produce that baby.

"There are different ways it could have occurred," Budd continues.
"Through intercourse, the normal way — a penis. People can be artificially
inseminated; all kinds of things can happen. Only your body remembers
whether it ever felt anything like this in the months prior. I want you to
concentrate all your attention down to the sexual parts of your body. I'm
going to count to three, and in those months or even weeks before this hap-
pens, your body is going to remember if it ever felt anything connected
with this.

"One," Budd says, "concentrating your attention down to that part of
your body . . . two, right on the edge . .'. three . . ."

"Tube," Alice says immediately. "A long tube like Dr. Fulton uses." Ful-
ton is their local vet.

"A long tube?"

"Yes."

"Where are you when this tube is being used?"

Alice pauses, thinking. "I don't know," she says. "Some place white."

"Are you by yourself, or is there a doctor there with you?"

"No. Just them."

"Just them," Budd repeats.

"Ohhh! Why are they doing this?" Alice asks, surprised. "Oooooh!"
"Does it hurt?"
"It's weird."

"What's the diameter of this tube? If you start with the diameter of a
pencil, is it that diameter or is it bigger?"
"Littler."

"Littler," Budd repeats. "Thinner."

"It's flexible . . . clear," Alice says, more in wonder than in discomfort.
"Is it attached to something on the other end?"
"Like a syringe. There's white stuff in the syringe," Alice says. "I guess
it's sperm."

"This is what I want you to do: Somehow or other you were brought to
that place and this was done to you. I want you to back up in time as if you
were backing up a movie. Memories are extremely clear. Let's move back.
Where are you?"

"I'm in the barn," Alice says, then corrects herself. "No, I'm in a field.
Pulling weeds! Oh, God!"
"What's happening?"

"I'm pulling weeds in the field. It's summer. The weeds are low."

Postconference Interview: Carol and Alice

353

"Where is this field?" Budd asks.

"It's the log cabin field," Alice says, referring to a field on the horse farm
in which the ruins of an old cabin remain. "They're in the field. It's a little
spaceship."

"How big is it?"

"About the same size as a station wagon. Maybe twenty feet long," she
replies. "They walk up to me. I have to go with them."
"Do you try to run away?"

"No," she says, then suddenly smiles. "We're floating toward the ship.
It's neat!"

"Who is with you?" Budd asks.

"There are three of them. One on each side and one in the front."

The Beings bring Alice into the craft, which appears to contain just one
large, round, white room. In the middle of the room is a table.

"I have to get on the table," Alice explains. "I don't think I want to do
this anymore," she says worriedly, as if speaking to the aliens, "Can't we just
not do this anymore?" There is a brief pause, and then she cries out, shak-
ing her head, "No!"

"What's happening?" Budd asks.

"Oh, I'm tired. They won't let me walk out!"

Alice is laid out on the table, naked.

"They've got that tube again!" she says, frightened.

"Is it like the tube before?" Budd asks.

" Yes. They put it in me!" she whispers.

"How far?"

"About six inches." Alice cries out in pain and curls up. "It goes into the
fallopian tubes," she says. "OWWW! It hurts!"

The tube is inserted past the cervix, into her left fallopian tube.

"Have they done this to you before?" Budd asks.

"YES!" Alice answers and bursts into tears.

"How old were you when they did it the first time?"

"I was just a kid!" she cries, outraged and hurt. "I was twelve! Oh God, I
hate you!" she says to the aliens. "Leave me alone! Go choose somebody else!"

"Where were you when this happened?"

"It was at night when I was fishing with my father," Alice replies. "On
a canal."

Budd and I exchange looks.

"Who else was there?" he asks Alice.

"It was just me and my dad."

"What is your dad doing?"

"He's just standing there!" Alice replies angrily.

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CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

"Does he try to help you?"

"He can't," she says with a mixture of sorrow and resignation. "He can't
protect me."

"What is he doing?"

"He's scared. He's just standing there. He can't move."
"How do you feel about your father?"

"I feel hatred for him!" Alice says, furious. "He can't protect me!"

Budd explains to her there was nothing her father could do, that he had
been "paralyzed" by the aliens; and that instead of hating her father, she
should direct her anger at the Beings. "What are the aliens doing to you?"
he asks Alice.

"They hurt me," she says, beginning to cry again.

"Where do they hurt you?"

"It hurts me inside," she says, then cries out, "It's too big! I'm just a lit-
tle kid!"

"Where is it inside?" Budd asks.
"It's in the vagina and it's big."

Budd establishes that the object is thicker than a pencil. He asks what
she is feeling.

"It's like a tearing sensation," she sobs. "I'm bleeding from my vagina."

Under Budd's gentle questioning Alice reveals this entire episode is tak-
ing place on the banks of the canal in front of her father. "It's like we never
left that place," Alice says. "They did it right there."

"Did your father see all this?"

"It was done in front of him, but I don't know if his eyes were open or
closed."

Budd takes the still-hypnotized Alice back to her Tallahassee trip and
asks her what happened after the Beings had taken the pear-sized baby away
from her.

"After they took the baby away, they cleaned it up and me up."
"Do they show you the baby?" Budd asks.
Alice shudders. "I don't want to see it!" she says.
"Why don't you want to see it?"

"I hate babies! They're not human!" she says disgustedly. "They don't
look right."

"Have you seen these babies at other times?"
"Oh, yes!"

"Tell me what they look like."

"They're not babies," Alice says. "They're just walking around. Thirty
or forty of them. They have big heads. Fatter bodies than the gray guys.
Some of them have little bits of blond hair."

Postconference Interview: Carol and Alice

355

"Do they say anything? Do they speak to you?"
"They make noises."
"What sort of noises?"
"They squeak."

"Why have they brought you to all these babies?" Budd asks.

"They want me to pick them up," she says, and makes a face. She is re-
volted. " Ugh! Someone gives me one! I have to hold it! 'I don't want to do
this!' ... I almost dropped it."

The encounter with the babies is so obviously distressing for Alice that
Budd decides to move her out of that scene to one from her childhood when
her father was stationed in England.

In past discussions Alice has seemingly recalled meeting a little girl with
glasses and blond curly hair from — or in — Wisconsin. Budd Hopkins has a
theory that the aliens assemble certain people together — that Alice and
Carol's friendship, for example, rather than being recent and accidental, re-
flects his hypothesis that aliens had placed the two of them in contact with
each other ever since they were little girls. Alice and Carol both sense they
have known each other for a longer time than their current relationship
would indicate; and each has memories of special "little girls" who were
friends they saw only at odd times. Budd decides to pursue this theory with
Alice.

That part of the session seems to me inconclusive. Under hypnosis,
Alice tells of being nine years old and meeting with a little girl in the coun-
tryside. Budd asks Alice how she had gotten there.

"I floated there from a ship," Alice replies.

"How old is the little girl?"

"She's older than me. She's in the sixth grade, I'm in the fourth. . . . She
tells me she has a gray dog."
"Do you see her dog?"
"It's not there."

I remember Carol's and Budd's exchange at the'M.IT. conference when
Budd asked the abductee panel if they remembered any childhood experi-
ences. Carol told of having had "an imaginary dog who took me for walks
to places where children couldn't go." When Budd asked what color the dog
had been, Carol, without thinking, had answered, "Gray," then exclaimed,
" Oh!" The dog, Carol had realized, could have been a "screen memory" for
a Small Gray.

Budd asks Alice if she had ever seen the little girl before.
"We know each other," Alice replies.
"How do you know each other?"
"We met when we were littler."

356 CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

"How little?" Budd asks.

"I was in a playpen. She's outside. I'm inside."

"Where is the playpen?"

"It's inside something ... a bedroom. There's a single bed. . . . She
doesn't have her glasses on."
"Who else is in the room?"

"There are other little kids with dark hair sitting on the floor in a cor-
ner. They're just little ones. . . . Why aren't they locked up?"
"Locked up?" Budd asks.
"In a playpen like I am," Alice replies.
"Why are you in the playpen?"
"Because I get into trouble."

Budd asks Alice to describe the other children. One, she says, has a bib.
Another is wearing diapers. One has shorts on and is wearing a little English
cap. His shorts are part of a suit. Alice doesn't know whose bedroom this is
and says they won't let her have toys, because "I throw them around and
break them." Budd asks her to look closely at the children who are off" to
one side, and Alice suddenly recognizes them: "It's my brother and sister in
the corner!" she says excitedly. "I think we're in England!"

Alice's sister Grace is only two. That means Alice is about three. "I don't
know how to talk yet," Alice says, "but the nice little girl knows how to talk."

Budd tells Alice he is going to wake her up because that's a good mem-
ory. But before he can do that Alice bursts into tears. When Budd asks her
why she is upset, she replies, "I feel guilty for my father."

Budd tells her she can now deal with her father in a different way and
that relationships, as a result of what she has learned, are going to make a
lot more sense.

He tells her she will be able to look at children now with a different eye
and a different sense of understanding.

He then works on her headaches, tells her that "those emotions and
feelings are going to come out," and when they do, gradually her headaches
will fade. And that there is going to be an "easing off of all the terrible ten-
sions and fears."

Budd begins counting backwards, five, four, three, two, one, the num-
bers becoming progressively louder. Alice, no longer hypnotized, lies there
on the couch for a few minutes; then she stirs slightly and rubs her eyes as
if awakening from a deep, restful sleep. She sits up, stretches, and looks
around the darkened studio at us as though not sure where she is or who we
are. A moment later she smiles and says, " Whew!"

Budd turns the lights back up, then speaks to Alice about her past coun-
seling. He points out that her counseling tried to focus on what Alice

Postconference Interview: Carol and Alice

357

thought was the problem: her alleged rape at age twelve by her father. Budd
explains that everything she was saying and observing about the rape "was
appropriate to the age" and that "decades of mistreatment have to be un-
done little by little. Now that it has been revealed as an alien-encounter
experience," Budd says, "the trauma should fade. The proof is in the detox-
ification of the trauma."

Her alleged rape by her father, Budd explains, was not the problem. Her
father had not caused the trauma, because he was not the source of the
trauma.

"It's not a hidden memory," he tells Alice. "You were being treated for
the wrong disease. The proof will be if there is a sense of relief. The
headaches will ease off. Depression will ease off". There will be a sense of
wholeness."

Alice does not look convinced. I ask her how she is feeling.
She smiles wryly. "I guess," she says, "I can't deny my contacts with the
little gray shits anymore."

CHAPTER XVI I

Postconference Interview

Carol and Alice — Third Hypnosis Session
at Budd Hopkins's Studio

After a break for lunch, Budd decides to hypnotize Carol again. He wants
to look into the "vivid dream" she had the previous July 15 — a dream in
' which Alice also was present. A "vivid dream" — also referred to as a "lucid
dream" — is what Dr. Jayne Gackenbach defines as "a dream during which
one knows one is dreaming when the dream is ongoing." 1

Based as much on current research into dreams as on his own experi-
ence, theoretical physicist Fred Alan Wolf explains that the primary differ-
ence between an ordinary dream and a lucid dream is "the extreme sense of
reality. . . . The major factor is the awareness that one is dreaming while the
dream is progressing and the vivid details that one can remember after the
dream. Upon awakening, the dreamer has immediate recall of the dream
and the recall that during the dream one felt in control of the events of the
dreaming entity.

"I use the word entity," Wolf explains, "because, although I know the
entity is 'I,' it feels different from my normal waking persona in several
ways. The awareness of being split into two conscious minds is the most
striking difference. There is the sleeping person 'at home in bed' and there
is the person experiencing the dream and knowing all along that he or she
is in bed at home." 2

On July 15, although Carol knew she was "dreaming," she also strongly
suspected that what happened to her in her dream was real.

"The word 'dream,' or the idea of dreams, provides a good example of
how a familiar term has to be looked at more carefully, even redefined,"
John Mack has observed. He continued:

When abductees call their experiences "dreams," which they often do,
close questioning can elicit that this may be a euphemism to cover what

Postconference Interview: Carol and Alice

359

they are sure cannot be that, namely an event from which there was no
awakening in another dimension. On several occasions I have seen a look
of distress, even tears, on the face of an abductee who is realizing that an
experience that he or she had chosen, more comfortably, to consider a
dream had occurred in some sort of fully "awake" (another word that
might need to be redefined) or conscious state, however different this
might be. The problem is complicated further by the fact that dreams are
an important way that we normally process and integrate experiences dur-
ing the night. Therefore, it is not surprising that, since abductions are
themselves powerful and disturbing experiences, they may frequently give
rise to true nightmares or dreams that recreate in modified form the ab-
duction experience, even during the same night the experience occurred. 3

Budd Hopkins wants to discover whether Carol's dream had any basis
in "reality." One means by which he hopes to determine this is to see if any
of the sequences Carol thinks she shared with Alice might be present in
Alice's unconscious as well. However, to avoid "contamination," it is essen-
tial that Alice not be present when he discusses the dream with Carol. Alice
is sent off to take a nap in a different room.

Once Alice is gone, Carol explains that in her dream she was standing
on the back deck of the farmhouse when a flying saucer floated noiselessly
overhead, paused briefly, then continued northwest.

Although it was evening, it was still light out. Carol tells us she re-
membered sensing that the craft wanted her and Alice to pursue it; the large
disc would wag sideways, then dart off, leaving a trail of light they could fol-
low. So Carol and Alice, in their nightgowns, ran together across the back
pasture and through the woods after the light. Eventually the two women
reached a large open field, where the craft was hovering quietly, waiting for
them some fifty feet above the ground.

Carol's dream immediately cut to Alice and herself outside the "hangar"
where a number of people had gathered. Some of them, Carol says, she
knew from their Maryland horse community and others from the confer-
ence at M.I.T.

"Guards" wearing helmets and masks that seemed to provide them air es-
corted Carol and Alice through large metal double doors into an under-
ground space cavernous enough, Carol says, to hold "several 727 jets."
Within this hangar was a huge saucer tilted up at about a thirty-degree angle.

The disc, Carol tells Budd, "looked like the one we followed, only
much bigger. Perhaps a little more oblong, with a fishtail flange at the end."

While Carol watched, four enormous caterpillar tractor vehicles, not
unlike those used to trundle the space shuttles to their launch pads, were
rolled up beneath the giant spacecraft, two in the front, two in the rear. The

360 CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

tops of the tracked vehicles then unfolded like a fire engine's aerial ladder to
further lift and tilt the alien craft until it was resting at a forty-five-degree
angle. It appeared, Carol thought, almost as though the huge saucer were
being put on display.

On the other side of the hangar were perhaps a hundred people, many
known to Carol and Alice. By now everyone had quieted down; they
seemed almost subdued. Carol remembered wondering in her dream why
all those people were there.

Far above them, the roof of the hangar had a slight dome shape similar
to that of an observatory. As the aperture at the top of the hangar's dome
slowly opened, Carol could hear bits of sod, falling from the roof, hitting
the tilted spacecraft below.

Alice was frightened, Carol says. She kept grabbing Carol's sleeve until
Carol became impatient and told her, "Just watch!"

By this time the dome of the hangar had opened all the way and Carol,
looking up, was struck by how black the sky was. The hangar entrance's
large steel double doors then clanged shut, the sound reverberating
throughout the vast space. Everybody who was supposed to be there had,
Carol felt, now been assembled.

At that point in her dream two of the helmeted, uniformed guards came
to where she and Alice were standing. She knew the guards were human be-
neath the mask apparatuses and that the masks were "to protect us, not
them." The guards escorted Carol and Alice across the hangar to where the
other humans were standing. The guards did not carry guns; instead, ac-
cording to Carol, they carried a rod-shaped, black electronic device which
Carol assumed was for identifying the people there. They "put the calcula-
tors right up against you," Carol explains.

The guards gestured for the first group of five or six people to head to-
ward the giant saucer. "When the people walked behind the caterpillars,"
Carol says, "you lost them, because the caterpillar treads were so tall they
were hidden."

Alice and Carol were in the second group of five or six. The guard led
them past the caterpillar treads to the rear of the craft. Each tread, Carol es-
timated, was well over eight feet tall and seventy-five feet long. Passing
them, she says, she noticed "a rubber, acrid smell of burnt wiring." Despite
their vast size, Carol was worried that the caterpillar supports might not be
able to hold the huge craft up.

She recalls that as she and Alice passed beneath the disc, she looked up
at some strange glassy globes that completely covered part of the underside
of the craft. "They looked like crystal balls, only they were milky," Carol
tells us.

Postconference Interview: Carol and Alice

361

She could see a door in the rear of the craft, but no ramp or steps lead-
ing up to it. She was still looking for the entryway when she saw the others
in her group getting "sucked up" into the back of the giant disc. She had time
only to wonder, How did they do that? And then, Carol says, she woke up.

Later, in her journal, Carol would write, "I awoke feeling very excited.
I felt as if I had really been there, had actually touched the caterpillars. I
could still feel the coldness of the metal and smell the grease and oil. It
seemed real to me, rather than the memory of a vivid dream. I can still see
the details of this craft to this day just as clearly as I saw it in my dream."

It is time for the hypnosis session to begin. Following a ten-minute
break, Budd gets Carol settled on the couch and starts to put her under.
After another ten minutes, Budd is telling Carol, "Throughout your whole
body there is a soothing feeling of warmth from your head to your feet.
Comfortable . . . relaxed . . . peaceful . . . relaxed . . . comfortable ... re-
laxed . . . peaceful . . . relaxed . . . And in this very relaxed state, with your
mind so alert ..." Budd says, and sets the scene for Carol's July 15 dream.
And then, once he has Carol standing on the back deck of the farm, he says,
"You're going to see something when I count to three, something beginning
to happen that's odd or different. One, something, whatever it is, is about
to happen. . . . Two, it's right on the edge. . . . Three ..."

Carol is breathing smoothly, deeply.

"What's happening, Carol?" Budd asks. "Tell me what is happening."

"I'm calling Killer to come back into the house," Carol says, and calls,
"Killer! . . . Here, Killer!" She suddenly exhales sharply. "Whew! . . . Must
be a plane. . . . It's no plane. . . . Ohhh, neat.'NEKTl It's one of them!" She
laughs happily. "Gotta call Alice. . . . Alice! ALICE! You won't believe this!"
There is a pause, and Carol calls impatiently, "Hurry up!" She is breathing
harder now. Even more impatiently, she calls out to Alice again: "Hurry UP!
Look at this!"

There is a twenty-second pause and then Carol says, "You know what I
think? I think it's one of those.'Look how big it is! It's huge /It's like a fish."
"Where is Alice?" Budd asks her. "Is Alice with you now?"
"Yes. We're both on the porch."
"What is she wearing?"

"A pink nightgown. We're both wearing nightgowns."
"What do you have on your feet?"
"Nothing. We're both barefoot."

"Is it warm out? Cold out? What time of day is it, Carol?"
"It's night. It's cool. . . . You can't even see the stars, this thing is so
bright! It has piece at the end like a fishtail. . . . Ohhhhh!"
"What's happening, Carol?"

362

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

There is an amused wonder in Carol's voice. "It's showing off! . . . No-
body would ever believe this! Come on, Alice, let's go! Hurry up!" There is
a brief pause, and Carol again impatiently tells Alice, " Come on! We'll never
get another chance like this! . . . Oh boy! Look! Look! Look!"

"What do you see, Carol?"

"It's kind of wagging at us. Hurry up! Hurry up! . . . Alice doesn't want
to go," Carol explains angrily. "We're going to miss it. Pay attention, c'mon!"
"What is the craft doing?"

"It's waiting for us down there. Nobody will believe this! Maybe
she — " Carol suddenly laughs. "So? Wipe it off!"
"What happened?"

"Alice stepped in manure," she says, still laughing. "She told me to
watch out for the manure, and she stepped in it!" And then, impatient with
Alice again: "Hurry up! Come o/z/Look at it up there! Geez!" she says in an
awed tone.

"You've got to quit smoking!" Carol tells Alice. "It's over there! See that
dark spot over there? See the stars? You've got to come!" Carol insists. "I'm
not going to go by myself."

There is a pause. "Alice! Listen to me!" Carol says. "We're supposed to
go. We have to go."

"So what?" Carol snaps. "You're not being rational, okay?"

Budd asks Carol what Alice is saying.

"She says it's cold," Carol answers, but then she is speaking to Alice
again: "It's not that cold! That's really dumb!" There is a pause, and Carol
asks in a sharp voice, "When are we ever going to get to do this? We got an
invitationfWhat do you want, to have it written in gold?

"You're being a baby, okay?" Carol says impatiently. And then her voice
softens: "I won't make you do anything more."

There is a long pause, and then Carol says sadly, "I'm sorry. I have to go.
/ have to go!" She begins to cry. "It's important, Alice. Please understand.
Please come with me — please?" Carol pleads. "We always go together."

There is another long silence, and then Budd asks, "What's happening
now, Carol?"

She does not answer.

"Where are you right now?"

"Nowhere," she says in a flat voice.

"Where's Alice?"

"She's not here."

There is something in Carol's tone that makes Budd lean closer to her.
"Where is she, then?"

"I can't tell you that," Carol says nervously, guardedly.

Postconference Interview: Carol and Alice

363

"Can't tell me what?"

"I'm not supposed to talk about that." Carol says tensely. She is clearly
under some sort of stress. I, too, lean forward. Something is going on here
that Budd has not anticipated.
* "Why can't you talk about it?" Budd asks quietly.

"It's just a dream."

"What aren't you supposed to talk about?"
I can t say.

Budd looks over his shoulder at me. Neither of us thinks Carol is talk-
ing about the spacecraft incident anymore. "Who told you not to talk about
it?" he asks. He is pressing her gently, trying to see where this might lead.

" They did," she says.

"You know you don't have to obey them if you don't want to, Carol,"
Budd tells her. "You can tell me what they wanted."

"Don't make me do it!" Carol says. She is becoming increasingly agi-
tated. "Don't make me do it!"

Unsure of whether Carol is speaking to him or to the creatures, Budd
waits for her to say more.

Suddenly Carol announces, "I want to go to the garden." She is refer-
ring to the rose garden, her "safe place."

"Why do you want to go to the garden?" Budd asks her.

"Because I can't talk about a dream. I can't talk about this."

"Why can't you talk about it, Carol?" He is still pressing her.

"Because it was a secret!"

"What was the secret?"

"That I was supposed to go," she says.

"Where?"

"Over there. And Alice was supposed to come with me. We're supposed
to do all these things together."

Her response suggests to me that maybe she is still talking about chas-
ing the UFO.

Budd decides to try a different tack. "How long have you had to do
these things together?" he asks.

Carol tosses on the sofa. She is now extremely anxious. "I don't like this!"

"How long have you had to do these things together, Carol?" Budd re-
peats a little more insistently.

Carol bursts into tears. "We were babies!" she cries. "We were just little,
tiny babies!"

"You and Alice?"

Carol nods yes. "I was holding her up. She could hardly sit up. We have
to be together, take care of each other."

364

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

"How old is Alice?"

"She doesn't talk. She's just scared," she says. Her tears have stopped; she
has brought herself back under control. "She doesn't know what they are."
"What who are, Carol?"

"They're on the floor. Like a tile floor. On the kitchen floor on a blanket."
"Are these other children?"
Carol nods yes.

"What do these children look like?"

"They don't have any color. They're not gray and they're not white."
"How old are you, Carol?" Budd asks gently.

"I'm four," Carol says. She has suddenly lapsed into a little girl's voice.
" She's )ust a baby!"

"Are there any adults around?"
"There's a lady."

"What does she look like?" Budd asks.

"She's just a little person," Carol replies in her child voice. "She has
funny hair."

"Funny hair? What kind of funny hair?"

"Stringy. Like she's going to go bald."

"What color is her hair?" Budd asks.

"Yellow," Carol says, the word sounding like "lell-o."

"Why is the little girl you're taking care of scared?"

After a moment, Carol answers, "She doesn't have a mommy."

"She doesn't have a mommy, so somebody has to be there?"

Carol has lapsed almost into baby talk. She takes little gasps of air be-
tween words. "Somebody [breath] to take care [breath] of her when she
comes here [breath] . I take care of her."

"And how does she get there when she comes there?" Budd asks. "How
do you get there when you come to this place?"

Carol's breathing is irregular because she's afraid of the answer. "We fly
here," she says.

"You fly there? Where are you when you start the flight? Are you at
home and they're out in the yard? Are you with your mommy and daddy?"

"I don't know," she says, and then nervously adds, "Sometimes I'm in
the closet."

"You're in the closet? And you come out of the closet?"

"When I think they're all gone," she says, becoming agitated again.

"When you think they're all gone," Budd says. He sees that Carol has
started hyperventilating. He puts his hand on hers to calm her ind says re-
assuringly, "You're all right."

Carol puts her index finger to her lips.

Postconference Interview: Carol and Alice

365

"We've got to be quiet?" Budd asks.

Carol nods her head yes.

"Just tell me what you're feeling," Budd says.

"She's scared — shhh!" Carol whispers. "She wants her mommy."

"And you're going to be her mommy right now, sort of? You're going to
be her little mommy?"

"Yes," she answers in a breathless, little girl's voice.

"It's okay, you calm her down. That's very good the way you calm her
down," Budd says soothingly. "You know just what to do, don't you? It's
nice the way you calm her down like that. She needs her mommy. Is she a
pretty little girl? Little baby?"
• "Yes."

"What color hair does she have?"

"She has yellow hair, too." Again, she pronounces it "lell-o."

"Now, let's see what's happening. This lady with the funny hair, does she
say anything to you?"

"She doesn't talk," Carol answers matter-of-factly.

"What's she wearing, this lady? Does she have a dress on?"

"No. She has . . . she has — " Carol inhales sharply — "loose skin!"

"She has loose skin," Budd says calmly. "Um-hm."

"It's funny skin. She wears a thing over here — " she says, touching her-
self above her left breast — "like a pin?"

"What is on the pin?" Budd asks.

"I don't know what it is. Maybe it's her name."

"Does it have writing on it? Does it look like writing?"

"I don't know what it is," Carol responds, still speaking in a little girl's
voice. "I don't see that before."

"Is it a picture of something?"

"No," Carol says, concentrating on the image in her mind. "But there's
something there."

"Does she tell you you're going to have to take care of this little girl?"

"Yes," Carol says. And then, as if she were afraid she is going to be pun-
ished, she says, "I was going to do that anyway. I would have taken care of
her anyway! I wasn't going to leave her all alone." Carol's mouth screws up
and she begins again to cry. "She's just a baby!"

"She's just a baby and you're like a little mommy," Budd says. "And you
can take care of her like a little mommy can."

"I will, okay," Carol says, still crying.

"You're a very, very good little girl, and you can take care of her fine."
Budd, understandably, decides to explore again his hypothesis that
Alice and Carol have been linked together since childhood. "Let's move

366 CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

away from this, and let's see the next time you see her," he tells Carol. "The
next time you see her, is she a little baby, too? Or is she a little older? Let's
go to the very next time you see her."

Carol inhales sharply.

"What happened?"

" Careful!" Carol says. Her tone of voice is different now: older, angry.
"What's happening?"

"Sometimes she gets dumb," Carol says. Her tone is that of a disgusted
preadolescent, a nine-year-old who considers herself an adult compared
with the child she has been ordered to deal with.

"What does she do when she gets dumb?"

"She pinched me!"

"She pinched you? I bet that hurt!"
"It's going to hurt her, too!" Carol warns.
"How old she is now?"
"I don't know."
"Can she talk?"

"Yeah — sometimes she doesn't shut up!"
"What does she have on now?"

"A little dresslike thing. It's a sort of yellow . . . it's got white on it.
White and yellow." When she says "yellow" we now hear the "y."
"Can she walk?"

"Yeah. Boy! She runs all the time! Can't hardly keep up with her."

"You really have to chase her around, don't you," Budd says sympathet-
ically. "What's around the room? Let's look at the room she's running
around in."

"There's other kids in there. I've seen them before."
"Tell me about those kids. What do they look like?"
"They're ugly," Carol says very quietly.
"They're what?"

"Ugly. Ugly kids," she says more loudly. "But you get used to it."
Her voice is still that of a nine-year-old.

"Now these little kids, do they look kind of like this little baby, like this
little blond girl? Or do they look different from her?"
"What little blond girl?" Carol asks.
"What?" Budd asks, startled.

"What little blond girl?" she repeats. "My little blond girl?"
"Yes, the little girl you've taken care of," Budd says, relieved that they
seem to be back on track. "Do they look like her, or are they different?"
"No, they're ugly. A.J.'s cute."
Budd and I exchange glances: AJ.?

Postconference Interview: Carol and Alice

367

"AJ.'s cute? Why do you call her 'A.J.'?" Budd asks. "What's that
stand for?"

"I don't know. That's her name."

"Okay, so you call her A.J. What does she call you?"

Carol thinks for a moment. "She doesn't call me. She calls me Mommy
sometimes."

"Because she thinks you're her mommy?"

"No! She doesn't really think that," she says, as if impatient with Budd's
silliness. "She calls me Mommy because — I don't know why she does that."

"That's because you're taking care of her like a mommy."

"She makes me mad, though. If I were her real mommy, I'd spank her,
'cause she doesn't listen. She throws things all the time. She's always doing
stuff."

"What does she tend to throw?"

"Anything! She throws everything you give her! You try to give her stuff
and she throws it like it doesn't mean anything at all."
"Like a dolly?" Budd asks.

"She doesn't play with dolls. We don't play with dolls. DqIIs are for ba-
bies," Carol says, but now her voice seems even younger. If Carol was a
nine-year-old at the beginning of this sequence about AJ.'s behavior, she
seems now to be five.

"She doesn't like dolls," Budd says. "What kind of things might she
have to throw?"

"She'd have a block. They gave her one to look at."

"What does the block look like?"

"It's a block with colors on it. It's sort of soft. She's supposed to know
what to do with that, /don't know what to do with it," Carol says, exasper-
atedly. "She wants me to help her do it and I don't know how to do it."

"How big is this box thing? Is it as big as a box of Kleenex?"

"No. It's like a . . . it's like a ... a block of, like, letters?"

"Like when you have little blocks with the alphabet on them?" Budd asks.

"Yes, only it doesn't have any letters. It has colors."

"Colors on the side?"

"And she's supposed to do something with that. But I can't help her do
that! I can't do everything!" she says, as if upset at the unfairness of it all.
"She gets real mad, she throws everything! And then they get all upset with
her, and then we all get in trouble because of that."

"When you get in trouble, what happens? Does the lady yell at you?"

"They don't yell. They don't do things like that. They take you and they
put you somewhere else," she says, clearly upset at the thought. "So she has
to be real good or they'll take her away from me."

368

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

"Um-hm," Budd says, nodding. "Now, when you say there are these
other children there who are ugly, are there other children that aren't ugly,
besides you and this little girl A.J.?"

"No. No."

"Just the two of you and then these ugly children?"

"Ugly. They're all ugly-looking children. They don't have regular things
like us. . . ." Carol pauses for a moment, then adds in a tone both faintly
sarcastic and superior, "And they're not real smart, either."

"Every now and then with children, you know, one of them will cry and
another will laugh," Budd says. "Do you see some of them laugh or cry?"

"No. They don't do anything. You have to make them do things," she
says; and now Carol's voice seems even younger than five, "/can make them
do things, too," she says cockily.

"How do you do that?"

"I go over and pull their hair."

"Oh? You pull their hair?" Budd says, turning back to me with a smile.
"What happens then?"

"Everybody gets mad. The lady comes and gets me and pulls me away. "

"Does she say anything to you?"

"She just tells me not to do that anymore."

"I see. Are there games that you play with these children?"

"We're supposed to play with these blocks," she says, then adds, "If they
don't want to play, you can't make them play." And then, in an angry and
impatient tone of voice, she says, "Oh, quit, A.J.! That's enough!"

"That's A.J.? What's she doing now?"

"She's just being dumb! . . . Quit it!"

"Let's just jump ahead a little bit. I want you to be about fifteen," Budd
tells her. "You're going to be an older girl — you're a teenager, you're in high
school. You're fifteen or sixteen. Do you see A.J. in your high school?

Carol seems to be thinking. And when she speaks, her voice has become
more mature. "No," she says.

"When's the last time you see her when she's little?"

Carol thinks back. "She was nine. She said she was nine."

"And where do you see her?"

"Ohh!" she says disgustedly.

"What happened?"

"Bugs!" Carol's voice has changed. She sounds like a young girl again.
Budd's verb tense, his "where do you see her" rather than "where did," has
apparently sent Carol back in time.

"Bugs flying around?" he asks. "Are you outside?"

"Are yon" not "were you."

Postconference Interview: Carol and Alice

369

She inhales deeply. "Yeah," she says, exhaling. "Geez, it's hot!"
"Where are you?"

"In the woods. There's a field out here. . . . Where the hell is everybody,
anyway?" Carol makes impatient little popping sounds with her lips: puh-
puh-puh-puh-puh.

"So what are you now, about thirteen or fourteen?"

"No, I'm — " she sighs deeply — "I'm twelve years old. I'm going to be
thirteen pretty soon."

"I see. Let's watch. I want you to see exactly the way A.J. comes. When
you first see her."

" Teh!" she says with a twelve-year-old's exasperation; then she makes
the little puh-puh-puh-puh-puh lip sounds again.

"Maybe she just comes walking up through the woods," Budd suggests.
"Nyahhhhh."

"I want you to look and see where you see A.J. first."
"0/>/"Carol says in surprise. "Don't do that! . . . The witch!"
"What did she do?"

"She comes up behind me!" Carol says, irritated.
"So you didn't see her come?"

"I don't know where she came from," Carol says impatiently. "She
comes up — why does she always do this!"
"What does she say?"

"Where haveyou been? Where have you been?" Carol asks A.J. , still im-
patient. And then, almost singing, she says, "You better be carrfulll. You bet-
ter be real carefullll. I know what I'm talkiri 'about. . . . Just be careful. Don't
do anything to make them mad. If you do anything, then it makes it worse.
I know what I'm talking about, listen to meeee."

"What does she say to you this time?"

"She thinks it would be neat. It's not neat!" Carol tells Alice, then ex-
plains to Budd, "They're letting her hold those babies, and they're not neat,
I'm telling youuu."

"What about the babies?" Budd asks. "I didn't understand this. She said
w/w?about the babies?"

"They let her hold the babies."

"They let A.J. hold the babies?"

"Yeah. Dumb, A.J.! I'm tellin' you. Don't let them do that. When they
start letting you hold babies, I'm telling youuu, don't let them do thaat."
"Did they do that to you?" Budd asks.

"Oh, yeah," she says matter-of-factly. "Lots of times they did that."
"You had to hold the babies?"
"Yeah, I didn't like that any, either."

370 CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

"What do the babies feel like?" Budd asks. And then to test Carol he
tries to lead her, saying, "I bet they squirm around and cry, don't they?"

"No, they don't!" Carol replies with absolute certainty. "They don't
do — it's like holding something dead 1 . 'It's disgusting!"

"All babies squirm around," Budd insists.

" These don't," Carol says firmly. "They're just like those other little tiny
ones that were always there. They don't do anything. They're like they're
dead. I don't even think they're real! I don't know what they are, but they're
not really like babies."

"Now, when you hold those babies — " Budd starts to say.

"God!" Carol says, as if repelled by the thought of holding one of those
creatures.

"Are they heavy?" Budd continues. "They feel heavy for a little girl to
hold, I bet."

Carol will not be led. "No, they don't weigh anything!" she says.
"They're like paper."

"Like paper, um-hm. Now when you hold them, how are you supposed
to hold them? On your shoulder?"

"No, you're supposed to hold them ..." Her voice trails off".

"In your lap?"

"No, up close," she says uneasily. "And walk them. And one time they
told me I was supposed to let the baby nurse. ... I didn't want to do that."
"Did you think you had breasts that a baby could nurse at?"
"I know I could. I'd done that before."

Budd is as confused as I am over what age Carol now is in her mind.
"You know you could? Did you have milk for the babies?" he asks.
Carol whispers, "Yes."

"How did you know you had milk for the babies?"
"I know it was there. Bobby told me all about that."
"Who taught you all about that?"
"Bobby."

"Who's Bobby?" Budd asks.

"Bobby Murphy. He told me everything when I was eleven," Carol says.
"Um-hm. Do you go to school with Bobby?"

"Nooo, nooo!" Carol says, laughing. "Bobby has his sister, Maureen. And
Maureen graduated last year. I mean, she's like five years older than I am."

"So he knew all about these things?" Budd asks.

"Yeah, and Maureen would help him, and . . . and I knew everything
about that stuff."

I am thinking, Jesus, what are we getting into here?

Postconference Interview: Carol and Alice

37 1

"Did Bobby go to school, too?" Budd asks.

"Nooo!" Carol says, as though Budd's question were too silly to be
taken seriously.

"Was he too young to go to school?"
"Oh, noooo! He's twenty-five!"

"He's twenty-five?" Budd asks, struggling to keep the surprise out of his
voice. "Oh," he says, "Um-hm. ... I want to ask you a very personal ques-
tion: What's the first time a boy ever did something to you or did some stuff
that had to do with sex? Was that Bobby? Or was that somebody else?"

"I don't like to talk about that," Carol whispers uneasily.

"Hmm?" Budd asks, not sure he heard her. "The very first boy."

"I don't like to talk about that," Carol says more firmly.

"You don't have to talk about it if you don't want to."

"Bobby was good! He was nice to me," Carol says, on the verge of tears.
"He never hurt me. He gave me books to read, and he was very, very good
to me."

"And he was trying to help you and teach you?" Budd asks sympathet-
ically.

"He taught me everything. And he never hurt me. He never, never
hurt me."

"Was it a bad boy who did something to you the first time?"

Carol can no longer hold back her tears. "It wasn't fair!" she sobs. "He
just didn't know! . . . He just didn't know. He probably didn't know how old
I was. ... I was too young, I think."

"Was this a boy you went to school with?"

"No," Carol says, still crying.

"Where did you meet him?"

There is a pause, and Carol says, "In a bedroom." She stiffens suddenly,
and I can hear her inhale sharply.

"It's okay, it's okay," Budd says gently.

"He's very cold! He's very cold!" Carol says, an edge of panic in her voice.
"Don't!" she says as she feels Budd's hand touch her shoulder.

"I'm going to put this blanket over you," Budd says.

Frightened, Carol insists, "Tell him — tell him he's cold!"

"Let's pull the blanket over you, okay?" Budd arranged the blanket
under Carol's chin and tucks it around her shoulders. "What are you on
when he does something?" he asks.

Carol is tossing and turning under the blanket.

"Let me hold your hand," Budd says, taking Carol's hand in his. "I want
you to hold my hand raz/hard."

372

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

Carol is panting with fear.

"Hold my hand real tight, okay?" Budd says, and Carol's hand grips his.
"Just tell me where it is and who it is."

She is still afraid. "In a bedroom. In a bedroom. A bedroom," she cries.
"Who is he? Look at him. Let's just get a — "

"I don't wantto look at him!" she says firmly. "I know what he looks like."

"What does he look like?"

Carol is still crying. She does not speak.

"What does he look like?" Budd asks again.

Tears stain her cheeks. "/ know who he is!" she says, racked with sobs.
"I've seen him before. Lots of times. / know who he is. 1 " She struggles to
catch her breath. " Ungh! He does things! He does things! And he always
stands there and tells me, 'Everything is fine. Everything is fine. Everything
is fine.' And it's not fine, because — " she says, and suddenly starts kicking
and thrashing around on the sofa. "Go away from me! Go away from me!"

"Is he doing something to you?" Budd asks.

"He's right on top of me!" Carol replies. "Go away!" She is still strug-
gling, trying to push this phantom weight off her body.
"Let me hold your hand — "

«T I"

Just go away!

"Let me hold your hand," Budd says gently, soothingly. "This is me
holding your hand now, Carol. Do you feel my hand? I want you to tighten
on my hand, know it's my hand. Okay . . . what does he do to you?"

She does not speak.

"Is he somebody you know?" Budd asks.

"No. I mean, I know who he is but I don't know . . ."

"Does he have a name?"

"No, he doesn't have a name."

"What does he look like?"

"He looks like them," she says with revulsion. "All of them."
"What color hair does he have?"

"He doesn't — " Carol's breath is ragged; she struggles to have enough air
to speak. "He doesn't have hair. He doesn't have hair anywhere. He's like
rubber. He's cold. All the time he touches me he's cold. Don't do that!" she
screams.

"What's he doing to you? Now I want you, Carol, to take a deep breath.
Just rest a minute, take a real deep breath. . . . That's good. Take a real deep
breath, a very deep breath, okay? . . . Are you warmer?"

"It hurts."

"What hurts?"

"Down there," she says.

Postconference Interview: Carol and Alice

373

"Down between your legs it hurts again? Is that where it hurts?"
She is silent but for her ragged breathing.

"Is it down in your female parts?" Budd asks. "Is that where it hurts?"
We cannot hear her answer.

"What did he do? Just tell me what he did," Budd says.
And in a voice so weary it suggests this happens all the time, she replies,
"He made another baby."

"How does he do that?" Budd asks. "Does he have a penis he puts in you?"
"No . . . no."

"He doesn't do that. What does he do?"

"He gets over on top of me," she says, wearily still, "and he puts some-
thing he has — he puts it in down there and he gets on top of me and it just
all goes in there. And then he takes that thing out and then it doesn't hurt
anymore. It's no big deal."

Budd appears to be digesting what Carol told him, and then he says,
"What I want you to do right now, jus t as if he's right in front of you this
minute, I want you to tell him what you think about this."

"I don't want to look at him," Carol says.

"Let's look at him directly, not just indirectly," he says, squeezing
Carol's hand. "Look at him. What would you like to say to him right now?
You can say whatever you feel like saying. All of the things you've wanted to
say and haven't said. Tell him what you'd like to say."

"I don't think I should do that," she says in an ominously quiet tone.

"Carol, this is your body and your mind. You can do what you want
to — " Budd stops when he sees that she is crying hard again.

"They can do this any time they want to!" she sobs. "They can come
and do stuff. They can come and put things in and take things out. They can
do anything they want!"

"Speak to him directly," Budd says, leaning forward closer to Carol.
"What if he says to you, 'I have your permission' . . . ?"

Carol's responds by savagely pounding the sofa with her fists. A cry of
pure rage escapes her lips.

"Okay, okay, take a deep breath now, Carol," Budd says gently. "Take a
real deep breath. You know he's lying when he says that. He's lying, isn't he.
You know he's lying. Now, take a deep breath, just a deep breath. . . ."

Carol is still striking the sofa with her fists, but no longer as forcefully.

"Nobody has the right to do that to you," Budd continues. "Will you
listen to me for a minute? Listen to what I'm going to say: Nobody has the
right to do this to you. No one has the right to do anything to you that you
don't give them permission for. And you didn't give him permission. So, he's
stealing from you, and taking from you, and that's not right. You have every

374

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

reason in the world to be angry. Every reason to say, 'Leave me alone! Don't
do this to me any longer.' Every reason in the world to say, 'Don't ever do this
to me again! Leave me alone!' "
Carol has begun to calm.

"If you feel you want to be angry like you just were," Budd says, "the
best, the healthiest thing in the world — "

Carol mumbles something, then says, "I fixed it."
"They can't do it now, can they?"

There is a pause, and in a much stronger voice Carol says, "They can't
ever do that again." She evidently is referring to the tubal ligation she had a
dozen years ago.

"Okay, feeling a little better?" Budd asks. "Take a deep breath. You fixed
them! You showed them! You showed them! Do you have a right to your
own body, Carol?"

"Yes," she says softly.

"You have a little granddaughter right now. "If she says to you,
'Grandma, people are trying to do things to me — should I let them?,' what
would you say?"

"I don't know what Y A say!" Carol responds. She is crying again. "You
can't stop them!"

"Wouldn't you say, 'It's okay to try to resist them'?"
"Yes!"s\\t sobs.

"Then that's what you must do, too. You must try to resist them."
"I don't know howwww!" she wails.

"Say 'Try to resist,' " Budd insists. "That little girl has a right to her own
body, her own life, doesn't she? And you're going to be able to tell her and
help her feel she has the strength. See, you had nobody to help you when
you were little, did you?"

"My daddy tried," she says sadly.

"Your daddy tried. But your granddaughter has somebody who can re-
ally help her, and that's you. You're going to be a big, big help in her life.
And that's going to be one of the most wonderful things you can do in the
future."

Budd sits back again and says, "Now I want you to take a very deep, re-
laxing breath," Budd tells her. "Just relax . . . just relax . . . just relax . . . just
relax. . . . Let's go back to that other little girl, A.J., and the times you saw
her. When was the first time you saw her when you were a woman, an adult?"

"I don't know if it's her ..." Carol says uncertainly.

Carol tells of seeing two women, one of whom might have been Alice,
in a Washington department store ten years earlier; the other woman
might have been Alice's sister Grace. Alice would have been around thirty

Postconference Interview: Carol and Alice

315

at the time. Carol thought she recognized her and had whispered,
"A.J.? . . . A.J.?" The "Alice" woman had looked at her, but Carol doesn't
think the woman recognized her. The next time Carol saw Alice was when
she became Alice's farm manager ten years later. She says she thinks Alice
is the same little girl she knew before; but, as with the woman in the de-
partment store, she isn't sure.

"Of course she looks older than she did when you met her as a little
girl," Budd points out.

"Yes, but I didn't know I knew her as a little girl. I just thought I saw
her somewhere before. It's very confusing!"

"Of course it's confusing," Budd says. "So we're now getting up to the
present. Here's what let's do. Let's move back to that field where you were
very exasperated because Alice was so slow, and she wouldn't come, and she
stepped in the manure and everything."

"That's her fault!"

"That's her fault," Budd agrees. "And then there's something about —
there's something you don't particularly want to talk about."

"Oh, boy!" she says reluctantly. "Do we have to do this again?"

"Yes. Let's just see what that was about."

"I don't know if I want to do this," Carol says nervously.

"Well, you've told me a lot about it. There's something about ... is
there something about . . . soldiers? What's this about soldiers?"

"They're not soldiers. They're guards."

"How do you meet these guards?"

"At the door in the tunnel."

"Where's this tunnel?"

"Underground! Underground!" she answers sharply, beginning to
breathe more quickly. "We're underground! Oh, I don't like being down
here! This is terrible! . . . It's cold as helldovm here! OH!"

"How'd you get there, underground?"

"I don't know! I don't know. We're down underground. We're down here
and Alice is not happy! She is definitely not happy. Not a happy camper!"

"Okay, not a happy camper. What's happening underground?"

"We have to walk into this big room like a hangar or something. Big,
huge hangar," she sighs, a little shakily. There is a brief pause and then,
"Ohhh, boy! Wow, it's sort of neat. . . . /think it's sort of neat; I don't think
Alice thinks this is really neat at all. Oh, wellll, we're here now. Might as well
keep going. ... A guy puts something on me. Puts something on me."

"What's that he puts on you?"

"Some machine or something. I just know it's a machine. . . . And it
makes my ear ring. My right ear. Buzzes or rings or, sort of, you know . . ."

376 CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

Her breath has become a bit labored. "There's a bunch of people over in the
corner."

"Let's look at the people. What do they look like?"
"Lot's of people. I know lots of people there. I think Alice knows peo-
ple, too."

"That's very interesting," Budd says. "Let's look at those people and see
who they are."

"Ohhhhh, there's Ruth, I haven't seen her in a hundred years. I don't re-
member her last name. I knew her a long, long time ago. I went to school
with her. . . . And there's LuAnne Morris. Of course, she's not Lu Morris
anymore. She was my best friend."

"Does she recognize you?"

"Yeah, and Jack's with her, too. Geez," she says with a little laugh, "I'm
surprised Jack's here!" She laughs again and calls out, "Hey, Jack!"

Budd establishes that Jack is LuAnne's husband. He is wearing a blue
short-sleeve shirt and slacks. LuAnne is in a red dress.

Carol is as excited at seeing LuAnne as if they had come upon each
other at a boring cocktail party. "Wow! This is neat! This is wild! Why 're you
here?" she asks LuAnne.

"Do you know everybody there or just some of them?" Budd asks.

Carol tells us she does not know everybody; still, she seems surprised at
how many of those assembled in the hangar she does know. Alice, too, ap-
pears to Carol to have found several friends.

Budd asks Carol if I am there. She says I'm not. Budd isn't there, either.
Nor is Richard Hall, the former NICAP director, who befriended Alice and
Carol in Maryland. "Let's look around and see if you know anybody else,"
Budd tells her. "Is Jane there?"

Jane is the government secretary with a high security clearance who, as
a member of the M.I.T abductee panel, expressed difficulty at leading "a life
filled with secrets" — the one who asked, "How do you open a conversation
with 'Oh, by the way, I was abducted by aliens'?" During an earlier break,
Budd and I spoke about Jane. Evidently she has been having a very hard
time. He mentioned that she had taken the commuter train to work the
week before and had arrived at her office two hours late with her shirt on
backwards. Lately, Jane has become so distressed, Budd told me, he is wor-
ried she might be suicidal.

Carol says Jane is there in the underground hangar, "but she's not talk-
ing to anybody."

"Let's look at Jane," Budd says. "What's Jane wearing?"

"She's wearing a blue sweater, and she's a got a blouse or something un-
derneath the sweater, because it's got a collar on it. And she has on like a pair

Postconference Interview: Carol and Alice

377

of culottes, knee socks ... I can't see her feet. But she's sitting in a chair and
has her feet tucked up underneath her — underneath the chair. And she's an-
other not-a-happy-camper. She and Alice ought to get together. Jane is real
upset. She doesn't look happy. I don't want to talk to her, because she gets
so upset all the time. I think I'll stay away from her."

Budd asks if any other members of the abductee panel are there.

Carol appears to be looking around in her mind. "No," she says. She
tells us she recognizes one woman she has met before, but cannot remem-
ber where she met her. Lansing and Amanda, a couple of women who
boarded their horses at the farm, were there, too. "Oh boy!" Carol says,
laughing. "This is really going to scare the crap out of Amanda! 'Hey,
Amanda,' " she says softly. " 'Hey, Amanda, it's okay. Ohhh, see? That's
scary, huh?' ... I think Amanda's really scared," Carol tells us. "Lansing
isn't. Lansing's all excited. She thinks everything is 'neat'! Lansing's like —
well, you could die and she would still think it was 'neat,' but she's
okay. ... 'I know, Amanda, it's okay. It's okay.' Some people are upset, some
people are scared and confused — 'I don't know what's going on!'" she says im-
patiently. "Why 're you asking me?" Carol snorts in disgust. "I'm just here,
okay? It's an invitation, right? You showed up, I showed up."

"What do the chairs look like that people are sitting on?" Budd asks her.

"They're metal folding chairs, but not too many people are sitting down."

"You said Jane was sitting down."

"Yeah, Jane's sitting down. She's like glued to the chair. Nobody's going
to be moving Jane. They'll have to carry her! Oh!" Carol says excitedly,
"Here they come! Here they come! Here they come! What are these guys?
Boy, neat!\ want one of those to ride in. Then I wouldn't get sawdust in my
eyes in the arena."

"What are you referring to?" Budd asks.

"The guards' helmets," she says. "Covers the whole head and every-
thing. I guess they can breathe in there." She asks one of them, "Geez, can
you guys breathe in there?" And then, as if trying to catch the guards' at-
tention, Carol calls out, "Hey!"She seems not to get a response and answers
her question herself, saying, "I guess so. . . . Okay, then they're going to take
some people. They pull out these things and point them at people, and then
they pick some and they go over there to this thing. . . . Ohhh, stuff is falling
out of the roof or something! 'The sky is falling!' " she says, and laughs to
herself.

"What's falling?" Budd asks.

" 'The sky is falling,' " she repeats. "That's a fairy tale or a rhyme or
something," she explains, making herself laugh again. And then, a moment
later, Carol announces, "This is really a weird dream!"

378

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

The heavy steel hangar doors clang shut, and then, as the ceiling begins
to open, the immense underground hangar space echoes and rumbles with
the deep grinding sounds of heavy machinery. Grass and sorrel and rocks
tumble from the lips of the aperture and drop into the huge underground
space. Some debris strikes the tilted spacecraft.

When it is Carol's turn to be led to the giant UFO, she tells Budd, "I
guess I want to go. I guess I do want to go. I'm curious," she says. "I really
want to see what's in there." But then, sounding uncertain, she adds, "I — I
just wonder if I get to come back. ... I don't know if I get to come back."

She is worried that the group that was led into the spaceship ahead of
her group has not reappeared. They were sucked up into the rear of the
saucer and have not been seen again.

"There are so many people and they're all milling around," Carol says.
"I see all these people I know and I try to talk to everybody, but I'm afraid
I'll miss something, you know? I'm afraid if I talk to somebody I'll miss
something. Something's going to happen. We're going to get to go now. Oh,
c'mon!" she says impatiently. "It's our turn! It's our turn! C'mon! C'mon!
C'mon! Look happy! Look happy! Look happy! It's just a dream," she says,
and then, very softly, says again, "just a dream. . . ."

The guard guides Carol's group between the giant caterpillar treads,
beneath the disc, and to its rear. "It's so huge!" she says in an awed tone.
"Nothing is this big! Nothing in the whole world is this big. This is really a
great dream!"

But while Carol is looking up at the milky glass orbs beneath the saucer,
she is gripped by uncertainty again. "I don't think I want to do this," she
tells us. "I think I've changed my mind."

"Maybe you don't have much choice," Budd suggests.

"Really I can — I can walk away from here. I don't have to do this,"
Carol says. "I can walk. They can't make me do this one. This is just, you
know, this is just a dream. I don't have to do this." She exhales sharply:
"Whew!"

"Do you want to go away from it?" Budd asks.

"Nooo," she says reluctantly. "I guess I can stand it. I'm so curious all
the time! Why do I have to be so damn curious? It's probably going to kill
me someday. Ohhh, crap! I'm going to go up inside it now."

It is Carol's turn to be sucked up into the craft; the quick ascent turns
her stomach.

Budd asks her what the machine looks like inside.

"It's absolutely huge. 1 " Carol replies. "It's like layers of stuff! There's holes
around things, and tubes, and you can look up through pieces and there's an
entire other section up there. Probably another one on top of that. It's like —

Postconference Interview: Carol and Alice

379

it's like a city in here!" There is a pause, then Carol exhales — "Whew!" — and
says, "Wow, this is a big place!"

She tells us there are maybe thirty other people now inside the craft with
her; but she is worried that she does not see Alice anywhere. "Oh, God, I
hope Alice came," Carol says. "I don't want to do this by myself."

Jane isn't there, either. But Amanda and Lansing, the horse farm board-
ers, are, as are several other friends she recognized in the hangar. Nobody
seems particularly happy, Carol tells us. They are all just standing around
waiting. And then, like pieces of mail, they are sorted and transported to
different sections of the huge ship.

Carol is among those sent single-file down a sloping, semicircular tun-
nel lit by fluorescent-like tubes within tubes. She has still not entirely re-
covered from the nausea she felt being sucked up into the craft, and now the
motion of her descent affects her stomach again. She spots Lansing ahead
of her and also a man she identifies as Rudd. Rudd is wearing only bedroom
slippers and Jockey shorts.

"I always thought Rudd was built better than that," Carol remarks. She
notices he has a scar on his leg.

"Where's his scar?" Budd asks.

"It's right here," Carol says, indicating the back of her left thigh. "It's a
big scar. I wonder where he got that from. He's funny 'cause he keeps try-
ing to hide it. Walks like this," she says, holding her hand behind her thigh.
"Listen, if I were him I'd be walking like this," she says, shielding her crotch.
"He's a nice guy. I like Rudd. I didn't see him before, but he's here."

"When you say 'better built,' do you mean more muscular?"

"No, just he looks pale like a chicken. But it doesn't matter what he
looks like; it just surprises me."

Carol describes others with visible marks or scars. And then she tells us
Erica from the support group is there, except that "she's not 'Erica,' she's
somebody else."

"She doesn't look quite like Erica, you mean?" Budd asks.

"No, she looks like Erica."

"But she has a different name?"

"Yes. I don't call her Erica," Carol says.

Erica is wearing only a T-shirt, Carol reports, "but it's real short. She
hasn't got anything on underneath it. I hate to tell her, but if she leans over
she's in deep trouble."

Budd asks Carol if any of the other women from the support group are
in the craft with her, and Carol says there is only Erica. "But it's not her
name," Carol insists. "Her name is something else. When I see her I call her
something else."

380 CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

When Budd starts to say something, Carol interrupts, insisting, "I
know it's her. I'd know her anywhere. I've seen her before."
"What do you call her?"

"Karen? . . . Carla? . . . Caroline? . . . It's something like that. It's got
hard letters, like a Karen or a Carla or a Caro — Catherine! It's Catherine —
I call her Catherine. I think that's her. It must be her. It looks just like her."

"Okay," Budd says, "so you go down this sort of incline. Is it long?"

"Yes. It takes a long time to get down there."

"Is there a railing to hold on to?"

"No, it doesn't matter. You just sort of — plupl — move to places."

"And when you get down there what happens?"

"There," it turns out, is a room with a strong, unpleasant odor — the
smell, Carol tells us, "of burnt meat. We all have to come through there, and
it smells real bad. Whew! I don't like this stink. It's terrible. Hope we're not
for dinner!" Carol says with a short bark of laughter. Then she sighs, saying,
"Oh, okay, over on one side there's, like, tray things, flat. I don't know what
they are; they're like trays, only they aren't . . . they aren't ..." She pauses,
exasperated; she doesn't know how to describe them. "They're like . . .
like . . . uh . . . metal trays, and they have these handlelike things on one
side of them. I don't know what it looks like. It looks like trays on this thing
that has handles. And there are lots of those of things — " she counts eight
of them — "on the side over here, and we're standing up against where the
wall, like, curves, up next to this tunnel thing that we came through. Ohh,
damn.'Th'is smell's starting to get to me."

Carol shakes her head. "There's stuff on this one tray over here that
looks familiar. There's this thing that has this itty-bitty little scissorlike thing
on the end of it. It comes out of this tube altogether, and then by com-
pressing something two little claw-things come out and hold things. And
they take things out and put things in with it. Ohhhh," she says, suddenly
nervous, "I know what they are! It's the stuff they use in the ears!"

She makes a worried little plup-plup-plup-plup sound with her lips.
"Oh, I didn't come all this way for this!" she says, then laughs sarcastically.
"Golden opportunity, right?"

"And then what happens?" Budd asks her.

"Okay, yeah, okay. We're going down past these things. I keep trying to
look at the tray," she reports, "but after a while I can't see it. There's other
stuff on there, I can't tell what they are. Oh, boy," she says, her voice sud-
denly shaky again, "we go past this stuff that has tables and things, and I
know what those are tooooo."

"Is there anything on the tables?"

Postconference Interview: Carol and Alice

38 1

"No, there's nothing on the tables, but I know what they are," she says
uneasily. "I've seen those tables before; they have these things, these boxes
things. Box things. And they have stuff in these boxes. And they have things
coming out of the box," she says, speaking quickly now, as if to get this part
over with. "Boxes that have these long, hoselike things on them. Stuff they
put down your stomach. . . . And there are things that come down from the
ceiling. . . . Oh, geez, I hate these places!"

Carol tosses restlessly on the sofa. "They'll make us stop here," she com-
plains. "I don't know why they're doing this. Why are we just doing this?"
And then, a moment later: "Phew!" she says with relief. "We're going on by
this thing and we go around, it's like levels. You move along and you're like
going around and up a little incline and then you go around again and
there's, like, another room. And it's like you can see everything. If you look
at it right, you can see all these levels in there. . . .

"I don't want to go up in heeeere," Carol says, suddenly sounding wor-
ried again. "I shouldn't have come," she sighs. "I shouldn't have come. Oh,
boy, that's really dumb! I'm such an idiot!" There is a little pause and she
whispers, "Ohhhh, God ..."

"What's happening?" Budd asks.

"I know where we're going," she says. "We're going to go up to the ba-
bies! They have baby everythings up here. They have baby babies, they have
baby horses, they have baby kangaroos, baby mice, and they have baby-
baby-baby — everything's babies!" She sighs. "There's lots of them, and we
just go from one little baby place to another little baby place. God, it's like
Universal Motherhood!"

"Are there grown-up kangaroos and mice?" Budd asks.

"No. None of those things! It's all baby things. Baby here, baby there.
Baby everything. Everything is babies. Oh, God, I mean I like babies, okay?
Babies are neat. It's okay about having babies. Babies are okay. But God, you
can't have everybody's babies." She exhales wearily. "Ohhh, enough with the
babies already. Enough with the babies! God, I don't want any more!"

Sensing Carol's exhaustion, Budd asks, "Would you like me to bring
you back home now, Carol, and then we can come back to this tomorrow?"

"Yes," she says.

"I'm going to put my hand on your forehead and it's going to make
your stomach feel much better," Budd tells her. He gently cups Carol's
brow. "Feel my hand? We're going to take you home now. We're going to
take you home and you're going to go up to bed. Up to bed and the
evening's over. We're going to come back and pick it up tomorrow where
we left off. . . . But right now we're going back to bed, feeling relaxed. Do

382

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

you feel yourself back in bed at home? Back at your farmhouse, feeling
better?"

"Ummmmmm," Carol says softly.

Budd tells her how relieved she will feel, that she will have a great sense
of inner strength. He tells her that her body is going to feel at ease now; that
she'll have a nice night's sleep; that she's come through whatever this dream
memory was just fine; that she feels a sense of togetherness with all those
people who are sharing these kinds of experiences. "But above all," he adds,
"you'll have that sense of yourself as a survivor. Here you are at this point in
your life, you've survived all these difficult things."

And then Budd brings her out.

"Five, you're starting to wake up," he tells her. "Four, you're waking
up. . . . Three, you're almost awake." His voice becomes louder with each
count. "Two. . . . One, fully awake."

Carol opens her eyes. The Saturday-night session has ended.

CHAPTER XVIII

Postconference Interview

Carol and Alice — Fourth Hypnosis Session
at Budd Hopkins's Studio

Alice is in tears when I arrive back at Budd's studio Sunday morning. She is
still feeling overwhelmed with guilt at having blamed her father for her sup-
posed rape during the fishing trip she took with him when she was twelve
years old. But although as a result of the previous day's hypnotic regression
session she is questioning her father's crime, she is still not entirely con-
vinced that it was the alien who penetrated her. "One image has not yet re-
placed the other," she confesses. "Instead, there is a new image, a new
scenario, and the old one."

Alice tells us that after the alleged rape her father could never under-
stand why she would not go fishing with him again. She also reveals a sub-
sequent terror of land crabs. After what happened on the sandy banks of
that canal, she would not get out of the car if land crabs were around. Budd
hypothesizes that a possible reason is that a land crab's eyes, like those of the
alien rapist, are wide apart.

He tells Alice that this morning he would like to hypnotize her con-
cerning Carol's July "dream" of the UFO in the underground hangar and
the two women's "possible childhood linkages."

"The importance of this," Budd explains to me, "lies in the architecture
of the acts: Carol and Alice knew each other as children and act as magnets
for one another." It is symptomatic of his hypothesis that the aliens "are
planning friendships or relationships" and that they bring people together
as "part of a deepening plan. But," he adds, "part of the problem is, What
does this mean in terms of relationships and control?"

Alice says she does not believe the "little gray shits," as she continually
calls them, "are capable of complete control." She compares their ability to
control humans to the amount of control humans have over their pets.

384 CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

Carol agrees. "They can control the body," she says, "but not the
mind." She gives as an example that although the Beings want female ab-
ductees to hold the babies, the women seem to have a choice.

Alice was not present when Budd hypnotized Carol about the dream,
so I know Alice cannot have picked up any details of her "possible linkages"
to Carol from that. And since in our extended conversations the two
women have never conjectured about such a linkage, and since I have never
come across any references to a "shared" childhood episode in either of their
journals, I assume that any previous interest in or exploration of that topic
would have to have been minimal, if present at all. As a result, I am not con-
cerned that Alice may already have been contaminated should she be ques-
tioned about childhood linkages.

I am concerned, however, that Alice may already know so much about
Carol's underground UFO dream that any supporting or corroborative in-
formation she gives under hypnosis would be suspect. I know, for example,
that Alice and Carol constantly speak to each other about their experiences;
and that Carol, in her journal, wrote a very detailed account of the appear-
ance of the UFO, of having called Alice out of the house to see it, and of
their race across the pastures after it. I know that Carol described their view
of the huge craft in the underground hangar, and that friends and acquain-
tances were among the people gathered there with them. Therefore, the
question I have is not whether Carol has spoken to Alice about the dream
but rather how much she has told her.

However, Alice tells me she has never read Carol's journal; and that since
Carol has spoken very little about the dream, she — Alice — did not "know a
whole bunch. I knew Carol had gone to some underground place where there
were a lot of other people, but she didn't say who. She told me she thought
the underground thing was in the alfalfa field out back, and that was it."

If that is so, Alice would not know that while chasing after the saucer
she, according to Carol's account, stepped in manure; nor would she know
she and Carol had gone inside the craft — an act that reminds me of Dave
Jacobs's aside to me at the M.I.T. conference, "It took twenty years to real-
ize the UFOs might have an inside." And that in turn reminds me of
NICAP's early ambivalence towards saucer sightings in general: if a witness
reported more than one sighting of a UFO, he or she was no longer re-
garded as reliable. The reason was that seeing UFOs more than once was at
that time as inconceivable as winning the lottery twice.

Budd makes Alice comfortable on the black couch, then slowly puts her
under. Once he is sure she is "asleep," he says, "We want to go back to the
summer, the warm months of the summer, when you and Carol were work-
ing hard at your place in Maryland. Everything is normal and nice. There's

Postconference Interview: Carol and Alice

385

going to come a certain night, however, back in July, a particular night,
you're upstairs getting ready for bed, and when I count to three, on that par-
ticular night you're going to hear Carol call to you. You're upstairs, not sure
what this is all about, and she's going to call to you from downstairs in the
evening after dinner. When I count to three, this very special evening you're
upstairs getting ready for bed, you're going to hear Carol call.

"One, you're about to hear her call to you from downstairs on the porch
or wherever. . . . Two. . . . Three. . . ."

Alice makes no sound. Her breathing seems deep and undisturbed.

"She's calling," Budd repeats. "Tell me what her voice sounds like. What
she's saying to you."

"Scared," Alice whispers.

After a long pause, Budd asks, "And what do you do?"
"I run downstairs and out to the porch. . . . Lights!"
"You see lights?"

Alice sounds puzzled: "An upside-down blue ring ... gas burner."

"The lights look like an upside-down gas burner, um-hm," Budd says,
and makes a note. "Where do you see this upside-down gas burner?"

"Between the chicken coop and the ash tree . . . over the orchard."

"What's Carol saying to you?" Budd asks. "Let's listen to what she's
saying."

"We're supposed to go," Alice says. "She's got my hand."

"Do you have your coat on?"

"No."

"What do you have on?"
"Blue nightgown."

"You said 'blue nightgown'?" Budd asks. In Carol's "dream" Alice's
nightgown was pink.

"She's leading me off the porch," Alice says, then lapses into silence.

"Tell me what's happening. Where are you going?"

"Back towards the trees," she says, and sighs. "We're going behind the
house, back towards the gate by the little pond. Towards the woods. I think
it's overhead and we're following."

According to Carol, Alice had hung back, Carol had to keep telling
Alice to hurry up. "Are you excited and eager to follow this?" Budd asks.

"Yeah. It's an adventure. It's exciting. . . . Ooooh!"

"What?"

"I stepped in something," Alice says.
"What kind of shoes do you have on?"

"I don't have any shoes on," Alice says. Carol had also reported they
were barefoot.

386

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

"What did you step in?" Budd asks.

"Yech, "she says disgustedly. "Something sort of squishy."

"What do you think it is?"

"I hope it's mud. I don't think it was, though, I'll tell you."

Alice scrapes the manure off with a stick and continues after Carol,
who takes her hand and leads the way. The disc is far ahead of them — "over
the mailman's house," Alice reports — and she, too, says it is light enough
out to see.

There is another long pause, and Budd asks, "What's happening?"

"A mine shaft!" Alice says, surprised. "Timbers!"

Budd tries to pin down where the mine shaft might be. "Is it near the
mailman's house, or where is it?"

Alice takes a deep breath. "There's woods around," she says. "Think it's
beyond the mailman's house. The edge of his woods."

"Are you tired from going such a long distance?" Budd asks.

"No . . . uh-uh," Alice says. "More like children. I feel like skipping."

"You feel like skipping? Good. So this mineshaft — "

'Tracks! Goes down. Like for a little railroad car." Alice falls silent again.

"Why are you going down this mine shaft?" Budd asks.

"I don't know," Alice says. "Carol's leading."

"Is it tall enough to stand up in, or do you have to stoop?"

"Carol's stooping. I can walk upright."

"I bet it's kind of scary, isn't it, to go down the mine shaft at night like
that with no flashlight?" It is a deliberately leading question.
"No," Alice says, not taking his lead.
"How do you see in this mine shaft?"

"The walls are green. And phosphorescent," she says, and sighs.

Budd waits for Alice to say more, but she does not speak. "What are you
seeing?" he asks her. "What's happening? I bet it's a small, tight place, isn't
it?" he asks, testing her again.

"No! Big!" Alice says firmly. "Clay floor. How can they get clay under-
ground?"

The mine shaft entrance is new information. Carol did not know how
she had arrived underground.

"I bet it's really dark," Budd says.
"No, there's lots of light."

Alice cannot determine where the light comes from; Carol did not men-
tion the lighting at all. But since Carol could see across the width of the
hangar, we can assume the space was well lit in her "dream," too. Carol said
the interior had been large enough to contain "several 727 jets." Alice now

Postconference Interview: Carol and Alice

387

says the space is "like two or three aircraft hangars" and that its walls are
faced with smooth rock.

"Just look around," Budd tells her. "Let's just pause for a minute. I'm
going to take your hand. You've come down here — feel my hand — we'll stay
together, and give me just a very good look around this big room and see if
you see any movement, or whatever. See if anybody else is there."

"It's weird," Alice says after a moment. "It's like there's Astroturf down
there. There's people in brown steel folding chairs. Nobody's sitting down."
Presumably, by that Alice means no one is sitting on the ground. Carol, too,
saw people in metal folding chairs; one of them was Jane.

"Let's look at the people," Budd says. "Do you see anybody you know,
for instance?"

"Most of them are strangers," Alice says, then adds, "Lansing and
Amanda are there. And Lansing's little kids are there."

Carol, too, saw the two women horse boarders, but she did not men-
tion the presence of Lansing's children. Amanda, according to Carol, ap-
peared very frightened; Lansing seemed excited. When Budd asks Alice
what the two women's facial expressions are, Alice says just that they seem
relieved to know somebody, then says excitedly, "Ohh! Tiffany is there!"

"How do you know Tiffany? Who's Tiffany?"

Alice sighs and says, "We were in school together. In college. I haven't
seen her in twenty years! There's a man with her. He has dark hair. . . .
How'd she get here?"

Carol, too, had recognized a former schoolmate she had not seen in a
long time.

Budd asks Alice how many people are down there with her.

"Oh, a hundred. Lots!" Alice says. "Lots. Big groups of people."

Carol, in her prehypnosis account of her dream, said there were about
a hundred people present. Under hypnosis, however, she did not mention a
specific number, she said only that there were "lots."

"Okay," Budd says, "let's look around and see if you see anybody else
that you know."

Alice lets out her breath slowly while she "looks around." She identifies
several people whose names are meaningless to us; none of them were men-
tioned by Carol.

Budd asks her to look around some more. He is trying to find more
overlaps between Carol's and Alice's accounts.

Alice sighs again. "So many people ..." She appears to be still search-
ing. "Colin and Mary and Barbara and Diana should be there, but I don't
see them."

388 CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

These names, too, are meaningless. "You don't see them," Budd says.
"We'll just go through some names, then. I'm just going to pick some names
out of a hat. First of all, am I there?"

"No."

Further questioning reveals Alice does not see me, Richard Hall, or Jane,
the conference abductee whose state of mind Budd was so worried about.
Carol didn't see Budd, Richard Hall, or myself, either, but she saw Jane.

Budd asks Alice if she sees anyone from the support group we met with
the other night. Carol had seen Erica, whom she knew by another name,
"Catherine."

Alice does not see Erica, but she does see Terry, the support group
member who had said she felt "a tremendous sense of betrayal" from her
abductions.

"Terry's hair is longer," Alice tells us. "She's shorter, too; I thought she
was taller."

Budd asks Alice to describe what Terry is wearing and then, in an effort
to determine why Alice and Carol are not seeing the same people, he asks,
"Are you still standing next to Carol, holding her hand?"

"Uh-uh ... no. She's on the other side, talking to somebody."

"How far away is she? Ten feet?"

"No — fifty, a hundred feet."

"Do you think she has a different view of things?" Budd asks.
'Yes," Alice says.

Carol, too, reported having become separated from Alice.

"Now let's look through the crowd," Budd says. "Is everybody dressed
in sort of casual clothes, or is somebody drejssed oddly?"

Alice mentions a man in a business suit. She doesn't feel he belongs there.

"How about anybody without any clothes on?" Budd asks. Here he is
searching for any reference to Rudd, the man Carol saw who was dressed
only in his bedroom slippers and Jockey shorts.

■ "No, most everybody's got clothes on," Alice answers. There are children
in pajamas, she says; she and Carol are in nightgowns; but most of the adults
"have real clothes on — except that weird guy in the suit with a mustache."

"Are people talking to each other? Do you talk to people? For instance,
do you talk to Tiffany, your old college friend?"

'Yes," Alice says.

"What does Tiffany say she's been doing since you seen her all these
years?

"She says she's a child's doctor, a pediatrician," Alice says. "When I
knew her in Colorado she wasn't even in med school." Alice did know, how-
ever, that Tiffany at that time was intending to become a doctor.

Postconference Interview: Carol and Alice

389

"Did she tell you where she's living?"

After a pause Alice answers, "California."

"Did she say what town she's living in in California?"

"Sacramento," Alice says, then adds, "We didn't really have much time to
talk." (Ten days after this session Alice is able to locate Tiffany and speak with
her by telephone. Tiffany is living not in Sacramento but in Cleveland, and
she is not a pediatrician but an anesthesiologist. She has never lived in Sacra-
mento, and never left Ohio during the period Carol's dream took place.)

Like Carol, Alice senses that the people gathered in the underground
hangar are apprehensive, subdued. Budd keeps asking her to look around,
to try to see if she recognizes anyone else. He mentions some of the other
women from the support group meeting: Brenda, Linda Cortile, Erica.

Alice does not see any of them. She does, however, see Pat, the M.I.T
conference abductee whose husband wrestled the alien to the ground.

Budd's next question seems to me to be leading. "I want you to look to
see if there's anybody practically undressed," he says. "A man?"

"Yes!" Alice says, surprised. "He's got Jockey shorts on. Hairy chest. He's
tall. He's got hair on his shoulders, too."

"Have you seen him before, or is he a stranger?"

"Don't know," Alice says. She appears to be trying to look at the man
more closely. "Hmm," she says. "He's got slippers on his feet. That's weird."

Carol, too, saw Rudd wearing only Jockey shorts and bedroom slippers.
She didn't notice him until she was inside the spacecraft. According to
Carol, he had large scar on the back of his left thigh.

Budd asks Alice if the man in the slippers and Jockey shorts has any
other distinguishing features besides hairy shoulders.

"He's got a big scar on the inside of his left calf, a long cut," she replies.
"It's all puckered, like it's a real bad scar, about six inches long."

Budd shoots me a look. I half-expect him to whisper that old Twilight
Zone line of Rod Serling's: "Coincidence? I don't think so. . . ." Alice and
Carol both saw a man naked but for bedroom slippers and Jockey shorts,
with a scar on his left leg. The fact that Carol saw the scar on the back of
the man's thigh, and Alice saw it on his calf, is irrelevant. The two women
might just have seen him from different angles; and if the injury was seri-
ous enough, it is not inconceivable that he would have been scarred on his
thigh and calf both.

Alice, too, describes the man as being not well-built, but strong. But de-
spite Budd's persistence, he cannot get Alice to identify the man as Rudd. We
learn later that Alice does not know Rudd; he is a friend of Carol's, not hers.

"One last thing here, on the people," Budd says. "You said there were
folding chairs. Brown?"

390 CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

"Yes, they're on the Astroturf."

"Let's just look at the chairs and see if anybody's sitting in the chairs.
Somebody may be sitting down."

"There are." There a brief pause, and Alice says, "There's a shaft of
light from the top! Lots of light! It's nighttime, isn't it? Where's that light
coming from?"

"Let's look at the people sitting down," Budd gently insists. Alice sighs.
Despite Budd's hope that Alice will identify Jane, she does not recognize any
of those seated on the folding chairs.

I am wondering whether Alice and Carol could be describing different
incidents. Perhaps they made more than one trip to this place. I write down
my question and pass it to Budd, who asks Alice, "Is this the first time you've
ever been in this place? Does it seem familiar in any way? Or is it all new?"

"It seems familiar. . . . Different people, though," she says.

"You think you've been here more than once?"

"Yes."

Budd then asks Alice to just let her mind drift and "see if there's any-
body else that — any other time or anywhere that you might have seen dif-
ferent people that you know. In other words, just concentrate on people you
might know." He asks Alice if she thinks she might ever have seen me there
some other time. No. Dick Hall? No. Budd? No. Jane? No. Brenda? No.
"Okay," Budd says, "let's just move now back to this light. You know, you
may remember things that will pop in your mind. You said there's a light
shining down from up above? From the roof? Or where is it?"

"It looks like an opening," Alice says. "Like sunshine's coming in. Like
a sunbeam."

Carol, too, described the dome opening; but rather than having seen
any light, she had commented upon how black the sky was and described
the bits of earth and rocks that were falling from the widening aperture onto
the skin of the huge disc. Alice has not mentioned the presence of any
spacecraft at all.

"What else is in this room?" Budd asks her. "We have the lights, we have
the people, we have the rocks around the side, we have Astroturf, the fold-
ing chairs. Is there anything else in this room?"

"There's something coming out of the walls. Like half an arch? Like a
runner in the middle, as though something's supposed to slide on it? It
comes out of the wall. I don't know what it's for. It looks like it's trying to
hold the wall up. Like a support . . ."

During the long pause that follows I am thinking that Alice's "half an
arch" might be the forty-five-degree-angle-tilted spacecraft. "It's dark in the
corners," Alice is saying. "It seems to go way back. All black . . ."

Postconference Interview: Carol and Alice

391

"Now, you come in there," Budd says, "and you and Carol kind of sep-
arated from each other a little bit, right? You said you were some distance
apart. Now let's just see what's going to happen next. Every dream or fan-
tasy or whatever has a sequence of events. So when I count to three, let's just
move to the next event.

"One," Budd counts, "we're just getting ready for this story to move
ahead. . . . Two. . . . Three!"

When Alice speaks, it is with a certain sense of wonder. "Most people
are gone!"

"Where'd they go?" Budd asks. "Did you see them go someplace?"
"No." Alice pauses and then says, "Shaft."
"Do you see Carol? Is she right there with you?"
In Carol's account, by this time in the experience she and Alice had ren-
dezvoused and were standing together in line.
"Yes," Alice says.

"So it's just you and Carol, and everybody else is gone?"

"Yes. There are six to eight other people around. . . . Tiffany is
gone. . . ." And, then with a mixture of surprise and wonder, Alice says, "A
green elevator shaft with eyes?"

Budd will not be distracted. He wants to know what happened to the
people. "Before we get into that," he says, "let's move back a bit, because at
some point, since you're in a big room and it's well lit and there's lots of peo-
ple, at some point you're going to see what happens to those people. We
know they leave, because they're not there."

"Have to line up. Have to line up," Alice says, then adds, "In groups.
We march away."

"Each person?"

"No, a whole line of people," Alice says. Carol had told of being
marched off to the craft a half-dozen or so at a time.
"Where are they marching?" Budd asks.
"To the left, around the edge, towards that arch thing. . . ."
Does she mean towards the huge disc?

"Is it possible that you march over there, too, since the other people are?"
Budd asks. "Maybe you do, maybe you don't. We don't really know. What do
you think? Did you ever march over there? . . . Maybe you don't. Maybe you
just leave. But since other people are, maybe you are marched there, too."

Here again Budd's line of questioning seems to me to be dangerously
close to leading. I can't help wondering if Alice is unconsciously shaping her
answers to reflect what she thinks he wants to hear.

I am bothered that I do not find Alice's account as convincing as Carol's.
But that may be a result of the differences in their personalities. Alice will

392 CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

speak of Carol's ability to "pick up more on details," whereas she herself
"picks up more on patterns and feelings." Carol is visual; Alice is analytical.
Carol's accounts are filled with intricate, subjective visual images and a
strong narrative drive. Alice's account is more detached, interrupted by
pauses and observations, as if she were standing back from the experience to
evaluate its meaning or uncloak its illogical flaws.

Alice tells us that she and her group are marched "toward that elevator
thing," then adds, "It's behind the arch. ..." I am wondering if she means
the disc's rear entrance, the opening through which the people, in Carol's
account, were being levitated into the craft.

"So you go over to that elevator thing," Budd says. "Let's just see where
you go now. Are you and Carol together, o'r are you separate?"

"No, we're together," Alice says. She mumbles something about having
found Carol, then says, "Umm, weird. It's like we go into a black hole."

Maybe the arch isn't Alice's visual interpretation of the leading edge of
the tilted spacecraft after all; and her "black hole" is not a portal leading into
the craft. According to Alice's account, upon their arrival at the "black hole"
opening, instead of being sucked up into the huge spaceship, she and Carol
"tumble" down an incline, "sort of like feathers floating."

In Carol's account, shortly after she entered the craft, she and Alice were
separated and Carol was moved down a sloping, semicircular tunnel that
emerged into a room that smelled of "burnt meat." During the journey
through the tunnel she saw Lansing ahead of her. Alice sees Lansing ahead
of her, too. But instead of emerging from the inclined corridor into a space
with a strong, unpleasant odor, Alice seems to end up again in the huge
hangar — if, in fact, we correctly understood that to have been where she saw
the metal folding chairs, all those people, and her friends.

"Since you moved on," Budd says, "it's obviously for some purpose.
Let's see what you've moved on to."

"There's a ... a Close Encounters ship!" Alice says, her voice filled
with awe.

"What do you mean by 'a Close Encounters ship'?" Budd asks.

"It looks like a big one. Except it's not as big as the one in the
movie. ... I don't how they got it underground, my goodness!"

"Is it resting on the ground? Hovering? What is it's situation?"

"It's hovering," Alice says. "It doesn't make any noise. A few lights
flashing."

"And what happens when you go into this room and this big thing is
there? Incidentally, I didn't ask, but since we all know about these experi-
ences, do you see any of those people around you associate with the UFOs?
That aren't human?"

Postconference Interview: Carol and Alice

393

Alice thinks there may be some Beings over by the ship now, but says
she's too far away to be sure. The "guards" whom Carol saw in a helmet-and-
gas-mask combination, wear, in Alice's account, dark business suits, white
shirts, ties — and are barefoot. "That's dumb!" Alice giggles.

"Sometimes people who are ushering have like a flashlight or some kind
of thing to point directions," Budd tells her. "Do they carry anything, or are
they just empty-handed?" He is looking for the rod-shaped electronic de-
vice Carol called a "calculator," which she assumed was used for identifying
people.

Alice appears to be considering Budd's question. "I don't think they are
carrying anything," she tells us. "They just say 'Follow me' and we go. Or
they go. The one that led us didn't go down the tube."

"Let's look at the face of the one who led you. What's he look like?"

"He's got a pointed chin and — oh, shit! He does sort of have those
eyes. . . . Not real bad. He's sort of got a face like a wolf."

"Does he have hair like a wolf?" Budd asks.

"No."

As her account continues, we learn from Alice that everyone is "just sort
of milling around" and that there's some kind of gold urn topped by a round
ball which they have to put their hands on. Alice thinks it reads their fin-
gerprints. Alice then hears "metal clangs . . . echoes" and says she is begin-
ning to get scared. She detects a slight odor of vinegar and attributes it to
her fear.

"How about the other senses — anything else?" Budd asks. "Sense of
touch? You've described putting your hand down on this urn. You said it
was warm to the touch?"

"The ball was warm; the urn wasn't real cold — not as cold as it should
have been. Oh! That's because of the ship! It's got heat near it."

"Can you just walk up to the ship? Could you bang on it with your fist
if you wanted to?" Budd asks.

"I can't reach it. It's too tall. Might just be able to touch the bottom of
it." In Carol's account the ship was hoisted out of reach on giant caterpillar-
tracked carriers.

"That's what I meant. Do you think it's close enough to reach if you
walked over to it?"

"Maybe on the bottom I could. It's too tall to touch its edge." She
pauses, then suddenly says, "A door! Ramp. Whoops.'There we go!"

"How are you going? Slow? Fast?"

"Floating. Fast. Just sort of pick you up and up you go . . . except you
don't lose your balance."

I am thinking this must be where Alice is sucked up into the ship.

394 CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

"So you float up fast into this. ... Is Carol with you? Do you see her,
too, going up?"

"I don't see her anymore."

In Carol's account, once inside the craft she did not see Alice, either,
and worried that she was going to have to go through the experience alone.

"Okay," Budd says, "when you get up there, what do you see? Where
are you? You don't see Carol, so you're sort of on your own now?"

"Yes." After a pause Alice says, "A spiral-like thing." She seems to be
studying it. "A spring?" she says questioningly. I am wondering if the "spiral-
like thing" could be the wedding-cake-like layered interior Carol saw.

And then Alice, surprised, tells us, "There are portholes and stars out
there! This is dumb! Can't be!" The pause this time is longer. "Crab Nebula?
How can that be?"

"Why do you say Crab Nebula?" Budd asks.

"That's supposedly what's there to the right."

"Is that something you recognize? Or is that something they tell you,
or what?"

"They told me that. . . . Oh, damn," Alice says, "Jo's here."
"Joe?" Budd asks. "Who's Joe?"

"Jo," I learned when I visited the horse farm, is Alice's familiar entity: a
Tall Gray Doctor Being similar to the one who keeps reappearing in Carol's
experiences. Alice first became aware of Jo during a hypnotic regression ses-
sion done with a Maryland psychologist in July in an attempt to rid herself
of the increasingly painful headaches she had been suffering. Under hypno-
sis Alice at first saw mostly colors — the sort of thick red mist one might see
through a microscope in a blood slide. But then that image suddenly went
black and was replaced by a very dark blue, brilliant, metallic light. As soon
as Alice saw the blue light, she started screaming and covered her eyes.
Within the light she had seen a pair of big, black alien eyes right in front of
her face. She next saw just the tops of four or five Small Grays' heads and
their eyes and deduced she was lying down on a table. And then the Small
Grays disappeared and Alice became very frightened, because all she now
saw was the huge, wet oval eyes and pointed chin of the Doctor Being, so
close to her face she cried out in alarm.

Before starting that hypnosis session Alice had discussed with the psy-
chologist her presumption that her father had raped her. That is why when,
during the hypnotic regression, the doctor first heard Alice's description of
this tall figure whose eyes and chin were opposite hers, and observed Alice's
growing apprehension, she assumed Alice was presenting some sort of
screen memory of her childhood sexual trauma. As a result, when the doc-

Postconference Interview: Carol and Alice

395

tor then asked Alice what the figure's name was, she fully expected Alice to
speak her father's name. Instead, seemingly without hesitation, Alice an-
swered, "Jo."

Joe? thought Carol, who was attending that session. She and the psy-
chologist exchanged looks. Who the hell is Joe?

Alice's answer had taken even Alice by surprise. She remembers think-
ing even though still under hypnosis, "Joe"? How do you spell that? Is that
J-O-EorjustJ-O?"

Jo, Alice explains to Budd, is "a Gray. One of the shits. . . . Why's he
telling me this about the Crab Nebula?"

"What kind of room are you in?" Budd asks. "What kind of space? Big
space? Little space?"

"I'm around in the front where the stars are," she says with a bemused
smile.

"What's happening?" Budd asks.

Alice is looking at a strange new creature. Jo has been joined by a sec-
ond Being with the sort of pointy ears worn by Leonard Nimoy as Spock.
"Spock-ears," as Alice refers to him, is stationed in front of some sort of con-
trol panel behind Alice and to her left. "Why do you think they have you
in that room with them?" Budd asks.

"They want to show me something," Alice responds with a sigh. She
suddenly twists her head to the left.

"What are you looking at?" Budd asks. "Do you see something over
there to your left?"

"Holes in the softness," she says. "Amorphous holes in the softness of
the edge of the wall. It's all rippled, like the lips of a giant clam. And some-
times you can see into the holes. . . ." There is a long pause; then Alice takes
a deep breath and exhales, "Whewwww"

"What's happening?" Budd asks.

"Boobs," Alice says wonderingly. "Little ones. On somebody."
"Who are they on?" Budd asks.

"A very pale-skinned, bug-eyed ..." Alice's voice trails off.
"But they have breasts?"
"Yes. They're little."
"Do they have nipples?"

"Yep. They're prominent. Very red. Like milk bottles."
Alice has lost me. The Being's nipples are prominent like very red milk
bottles? What does this mean?

"Where'd this person come from?" Budd asks.

"I don't know. Out of the wall? Out of those holes in the soft wall?"

396 CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

Alice tells us the Being is naked except for a cape crossed over "her"
shoulders, leaving her breasts bare. "She" has no hair, nothing that might be
female genitalia.

"Whoops!" Alice says. "She just got down on all fours and went away.
Right out the door. That was weird. She just left! Don't know what it was."
"Did you see the feet going out the door?"

"Nope," Alice says, and then her tone of voice changes, as if she were
speaking to someone else. "I don't want to sit in that chair," she says. "But
I have to? Okay."

"So you sit in the chair?"

"Yes."

"Is this one of those metal folding chairs?"

"No, it's a soft white chair," Alice says. "Damn, I can't get up!" She falls
silent again, then sighs and says, "Little balls."
"What?"

"Little balls. Yes, sort of like — " she makes a fluttering butterfly mo-
tion — "in front of the screen. . . . They're like light balls . . . balls of light,"
she says, and sighs again. "Do anything you want," she says with a hint of
petulance. "I don't care. . . . I'll just sit here. Not going to do anything."

"Is your nightgown long enough to keep you warm?" Budd asks.

"It's gone," she says, and whispers as if to herself, "God, I want it on the
right side out this time. Dumb shits."

"Do you want it right side out because sometimes it's put on wrong side
out, is that it?"

"They're not too bright that way," Alice says, and heaves a big sigh. "Can
I go home now? I'm bored. ... I don't care. . . ." She seems to be talking to
the Beings again. 'You know, guys, this is getting pretty old!" she says with im-
patience. "If you're not going to do anything, let me go home. I got to go to
work tomorrow! I need some sleep. Get on with the show, or send me home."

"Are these little lights still there bouncing around?" Budd asks.

"Nope, they're gone."

"Do you think these things were alive, or were they just lights? Or what
were they, or do you know?"

Alice shakes her head. "They just were," she says. "They just were."

"So do they let you go home now? Or do you have something else in
mind?"

"Yeah, I think I've got to sit there for a while. It's boring!"
"How do you feel sitting there with no clothes on?"
"I don't give a damn," Alice says, and heaves another big sigh.
"Well, let's see the next thing. Let's move this ahead to the next event,"
Budd says. "Obviously, you're sitting there and there's going to be some-

Postconference Interview: Carol and Alice

397

thing happening. It may just be that you get up and walk away, we don't
know. When I count to three, we'll go to the next incident. . . .

"One," Budd counts, "you're sitting in the chair, about to move to what
happens next. . . .

"Two," he says, "we're right on the edge now. . . .

"Three!"

There is silence. Alice's breathing is regular; her body is still. "Clouds,"
she says suddenly.

" Clouds?" Budd asks, barely containing his surprise.

"Volcano?" Alice says quizzically. "Oceans? . . . WhoafWere going fast!"

Budd is confused. "Where do you see these things?" he asks.

"Weird, but true," Alice says, sounding almost chipper. "Just floating
along."

"Now, let's look out of the corner of your eye, and let's see if you see any
of the people."

"Yep," Alice says cheerily.

"Where are they?"

"One on each side."

"What are they doing?" Budd asks.

"They've got my hands. . . . God," she whispers with wonder in her
voice, "this is like Superman. . . ." The image she has is the scene in the
movie Superman in which Lois Lane is flown over moonlit Metropolis by
Superman. "Zooooommmm!" she says.

"Are the men looking in your direction or away from you?"

"They're looking ahead. I can sort of look around, though. I mean, I get
to look down. It's okay. It's sort of neat."

"Do you see cities? Roads?"

"Cities, yeah — New York City. But I've never seen it like this. They say
it's New York City, though. . . ." After a brief pause she asks, "Why do we
have to land here when I don't have any clothes on?" There is a trace of ap-
prehension in her voice.

"Where are you landing?" Budd asks.

"Somewhere in New York."

It is here that Alice's account becomes the most dreamlike. The two Be-
ings land with Alice at night in front of a large Manhattan building. There
is nobody around to notice Alice is nude. She cannot identify the street she
is on; but says the building has "dumbbell-shaped" glass on it and the
number 21.

Alice and the two Beings enter the building, apparently by passing
through its closed glass doors. Inside they are standing on a red carpet;
there is a small banklike counter and velvet ropes suspended from stan-

398 CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

chions and, beyond the ropes, stairs leading up. Alice deduces she's in the
lobby of a theater.

There is no one in the theater except Alice and the two Beings. The
three of them continue into the auditorium itself. Only the stage is lit.

As they float down to the stage Alice complains, "I don't have time to
sit through a play. C'mon, guys, what is this?"

The stage is bare except for a prop rowboat. Only its bow half is visible,
pointing from behind the curtain stage left.

"I don't want to go on stage!" Alice says impatiendy, then, with a sigh,
complies. "Okay," she says. There is a pause and Alice testily says, "Quit
farting around and take me home!" There is a longer pause and Alice again
sighs. "Supposed to meet somebody here," she explains.

"Let's move ahead to that," Budd says. "Do you recognize who you
meet, or is this a stranger?"

"It's a stranger," Alice says, sounding both surprised and confused. It is
as though she had expected to meet someone else. "He has a hat on — he has
a coat on," she reports. And then, as if only just now realizing she is on a
well-lit stage standing naked before him, she adds with obvious embarrass-
ment, " God, he's got clothes on! This isn't fair!" But then she reports, "He
doesn't care." And a moment later, "I thought I looked pretty good, too!"

"What does he say to you? What made you say that just now?"

"He looked at me," Alice says matter-of-factly.

"So you mean he looked at you like he was attracted to you?" Budd asks.

Alice nods yes. "God, he's good-looking," she says, then sighs. "I don't
want to go away now."

The Grays apparently want Alice to leave, but now she doesn't want to.
She is attracted to the stranger and would like to get to know him. She tells
us the stranger's name is Derek, that he's in his mid-forties, over six feet tall,
clean-shaven. He has sandy brown hair — almost, but not quite, blond. His
speaking voice is trained, cultured, rich, as though he belonged in the the-
ater. His accent is Continental.

"Does he look at you — after all, you're not dressed — does he look at you
as if he's thinking erotic thoughts?" Budd asks.

"Yep," Alice says cheerily. "That's okay." She is silent, then says with a
big sigh, "Shit! Another married one. Goddamn wedding ring on."

Alice is quite certain that she has never seen him before.

"Can you imagine what he might look like when he's ..." Budd pauses,
then says, "sixteen?"

"Ohhhh," Alice says disappointedly. "I thought you were going to say
'naked.' "

"Well, let's do that," Budd says.

Postconference Interview: Carol and Alice

399

"Yes. Sort of nice." She takes a deep breath. "Hmmmmm," she says.
"Do you see him naked, or are you just guessing?"
"Just guessing."
"Does he touch you?"

"He gives me a hug," Alice answers. "Tells me it's okay to go. We'll meet
again. . . . How does he know that?"

Budd asks Alice to think of the stranger as a sixteen-year-old. Alice
seems to be considering that, then says he has light blond hair, freckles, and
is wearing a green-and-white-striped rugby shirt.

"Where are you?" Budd asks.

Without a moment's hesitation Alice responds, "England."

Alice tells us she has met him in the stands during a soccer practice. She
does not even like soccer and wonders what she's doing there. She is now
fourteen, but he's a lot older. "I think he thinks I'm just a kid," she says.

She believes they may have been kissing and hugging and that it felt
good, but that it wasn't "serious like adults get serious," she says. "It was just
kids and it felt good. Till it got scary, and then we ran away."

"Do you think you ever saw him earlier, when you were even younger?"
Budd asks her. "As younger kids? . . . Maybe you did, maybe you didn't."

Alice says she doesn't know.

"Okay, we're going to move back to the theater and he is there and he's
told you he's going to see you again, and the little gray guys are going to take
you away. Is that what happens?"

"God, that's a neat feeling!" Alice exclaims. "Rising above the
steps . . . ahhh, out the front door and up."

Budd again tries to ascertain where in New York Alice might be. But she
cannot see any street markers or store names, no neon signs. There are cars
parked along the street, but she cannot tell their age. "Cars are cars," she
says, though she adds that she has the feeling there's an airport nearby.

Budd asks her if anything seems unusual about the street.

'Yeah," Alice says. "It seems so quiet! New York's supposed to be busy,
busy, busy."

"Now, when they take you away, where do you go?" Budd asks. "You're
flying along, where do you end up at the end of this flight?"

Alice seems to be looking around her. "In the woods," she finally says.
"It's all pine trees."

"Are you still naked?"

'Yes," Alice says. And then she recognizes where she is. "Oh, my good-
ness!" she says. "That's the pine tree where I buried the foal. It's in the back
of the property." Carol is nowhere around. Alice inhales sharply. "All of a
sudden I got my nightgown back on."

400

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

"While you're standing in the field?"
"Yes, it just sort of appeared."

Alice walks back to the farmhouse, pausing only to say "hi" to the horses
on the way back, and is surprised to discover that Carol is already in bed.

"I want you just to look at yourself, your body, your hands, your feet,
knees," Budd says. "Is there anything . . . ?"

"My feet are dirty," Alice says, then says, "Oh, well, I'm tired. I'll go to
bed anyway."

"Okay, just before I wake you up I want to set a little scene," Budd tells
her. "A number of years ago, you were in a department store shopping. And
when I count to three, you'll hear somebody calling to you very softly. You
might be a little confused, but you'll hear somebody call you softly by a spe-
cial name. You'll hear who's calling. So, one, you're in the store, this is a few
years ago. . . . Two, you're about to hear some person calling to you. . . .
Three."

Alice is silent. Budd is obviously trying to link Carol's account of pos-
sibly having recognized Alice, and maybe Grace, ten years ago in a Wash-
ington department store. According to Carol, at that time she had softly
called to Alice, "AJ.? . . . A.J.?" But Alice hadn't answered.

"What are you hearing?" Budd asks.

Alice frowns. " 'Didi Kitten.' "

"What is that again?" Budd asks.

" 'Didi' and 'Kitten.' "

"What does that mean?"

Alice laughs. "I don't know, but there's somebody playing underneath
the dresses over there. A little girl, in the store."

The little girl is about six years old. She is blond and is wearing saddle
shoes and white cotton socks.

"And she says 'Didi Kitten'? What do you think that means?" Budd asks.

"Like she wants me to play," Alice says in a child's voice.

"She wants you to play. Is she calling you like you're a kitten?"

"Yes," Alice whispers.

"What's the 'Didi' mean?" Budd asks. "Is that just childish words, or
does that mean something to you?"

"I don't know," Alice says, then explains, "My mother takes me away
too quick."

"Okay," Budd says, "let's move this ahead now. Let's make you thirty or
so. Let's put you again in the store in your thirties. In another store. Let's see
if anybody whispers anything to you. . . . You may notice something; you
may notice nothing. But you may unconsciously hear something, some-
body whispering to you. Calling. It might not be 'Didi Kitten,' it might be.

Postconference Interview: Carol and Alice

40 1

It might be something else. We don't know. ..." There is a long pause, and
Budd says, "Maybe you just don't hear anything."

"I can't even find the store!" Alice says, frustrated. Her voice is normal
again. "You sure I was in a store when I was thirty?"

Budd specifies that the store was in Washington, that Alice was between
the ages of twenty-five and thirty-five, and, at my suggestion, adds Alice's
sister Grace to the scenario to further narrow it down. "Okay," he says. "I'm
going to put my hand in your hand. I want you to be in the store now with
Grace, your sister. It's a while ago. Doesn't matter how old you are. You're a
mature woman — anywhere from late twenties to late thirties, somewhere in
there. You're in a store. . . . Somebody whispers something. . . ."

Alice is silent.

"What's the matter? You don't remember anything? That's okay."
Budd decides to end the session.
"So, five," he says, "you're starting to wake up. . . .
"Four," he says, his voice becoming louder and louder, "waking up. . . .
"Three, almost awake. . . .
Iwo. . . .

"One," Budd says in a normal speaking tone. "Fully awake."
Alice's eyes are open. She remains quiet, as though she were surfacing
from a deep sleep.

"Now, that," she says, "was a weird dream!"

Later, during the post-session discussion, Carol points out that as a
child she had named all her stuffed toy kittens "Didi Kitten" and that she
had saddle shoes and wore them all the time.

CHAPTER XIX

Postconference Interview

Carol and Alice — Fifth Hypnosis Session
at Budd Hopkins's Studio

After lunch on Sunday, Budd prepares to hypnotize Carol for a third time
that weekend. They want to explore Carol's experiences of December 15,
it/91, and January 2, 1992.

The December 15 episode was the one in which Carol, while driving
Alice's car back from a visit to her parents' house, again saw three bright
lights in the sky. Afterwards, she returned to the farm panicked, disoriented,
nauseous, with her earlobes bleeding and her earrings in backwards. She was
also missing time.

On January 2, Carol was returning from a business dinner in town with
the friend's beautifully wrapped Christmas gift of brownies, fruitcake, cook-
ies, and fudge on the seat of the farm's pickup truck beside her. When she
arrived back at the farm the gift was minus half its contents and its wrap-
ping paper was torn and masking-taped. Again she was panicked, disori-
ented, nauseous, and missing time.

Carol and I covered both these incidents that June night in my Boston
hotel room after the M.I.T conference; so I am already familiar with the de-
tails leading up to the alleged abductions.

Carol is made comfortable on Budd's black couch; the pink wool blan-
ket is arranged around her for warmth. Budd is seated near her head, his yel-
low legal pad on his lap. I am in my customary spot just behind his right
shoulder. Alice is curled up on a fluffy sleeping bag on the floor.

"Now, we'll go back to December 15, 1991," Budd is telling Carol. "You
were coming back from Hagerstown. How far from home were you when
you saw the lights?"

"From the main drag going through Mount Airy, I was on that route
that leads to the farm," Carol says.

Postconference Interview: Carol and Alice

403

"So you'd already turned off Interstate 70 and were on Route 32 going
northeast in Alice's red hatchback, and you stopped because you saw the
lights?"

"Well, I pulled over just because I wanted to get a better look at them,"
Carol explains. "They didn't look like airplanes, and if they were airplanes,
they were damn close to the ground. They didn't make any noise, though."

"Then this is the first conscious memory you had of a UFO thing?"

"It's the first time I associated anything that happened being related to
the lights."

"That's what I mean," Budd says. "Okay, let's get started."

1 1 i s a quarter t o four. By four, Carol i s hypnotized and the session begins.

"I want you to go back to that December fifteenth incident, when you
were making that drive home from seeing your family in Hagerstown,"
Budd says softly. "It's such a familiar drive — you've made it many, many
times coming back from Hagerstown. It's evening. You're driving along in
Alice's little red car, you're just driving along December fifteenth, kind of
anxious to get home; the trip is getting a little tiring. It's nighttime, or
getting there. You're driving along Route 32, you make the turn, you're
driving back very close to the farm, you're going to look over to the side
and you're going to see something odd. When I count to three, you'll see
something strange. You don't know what it is exactly as you're driving
along. . . .

"One," Budd counts, "you're going to look up and see something
odd....

"Two," he says, and pauses.

"Three!"

Carol is silent.

"Do you see something unusual that you don't understand exactly?"
Budd asks her.

"My head hurts," she tells us.

"Your head hurts?"

Carol winces with pain, " Owl Geez!"

"Does it hurt more on one side than the other?"

"Yes. . . . I've got to pull over," Carol says. She is in obvious agony.

"We're going to turn that pain down," Budd tells her.

"It's right there," Carol says. She touches herself just over her left eye.

Budd places his fingertips on the spot Carol indicated. He tells her he
is turning the pain down like a volume button from a six to a five to a four

404

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

to a three to a two, and as the numbers get lower, Carol responds with vis-
ible and audible relief.

"Now, when it stops," Budd says, "what happens?"

"I don't know," she answers. "I just put my head down."

"Against the steering wheel or something like that?"

"Yes. I must be tired. It hurts. . . ." She is breathing heavily, panting al-
most. "My ears are ringing. Must be a really bad headache or something.
Whew! Can't drive like this. . . ."

"Where are you exactly?"

"I'm at the side of the road. I let the car stall or something," she says,
then adds, "Not that I care."

"Did you feel it jump just before it stalled?"

"No," she says, still breathing hard. "My head hurts so bad I didn't no-
tice. . . . Whew!"

"Is the dashboard lit up? Can you see to drive?"

"No. The lights aren't on. I probably turned them off." Carol winces
with pain. " Ohhh ... oh, boy!"

"Let's just turn that hurt down again. My hand is back on the dial — I
can still turn it down a little bit. I want you to keep looking, see what you
notice. Are you near a house? Are there trees? What is there?"

"There's a mailbox in front of the car. No name. It's got numbers on it,
but I can't tell what they are. . . . Whew!" Carol exhales sharply and mum-
bles something like "Oh, I don't want to drive."

"What did you say?" Budd asks her.

"I need to go and I don't want to drive," she says. "There's nobody home
anyway. All the lights are off, so I'm sitting in somebody's driveway or some-
thing." She pauses for a moment, then asks questioningly: "Street-
lights? . . . Why are there streetlights up there? Oh, man, it hurts to look at
them! They're so bright, it hurts my eyes!"

"Let's look away so it doesn't hurt your eyes," Budd tells her. "Just
glance away. Lower your eyes. ... So are these streetlights on their poles
now?"

"I don't know, but they've got to be streetlights over there. . . . Ohh,
awful bright!" Carol, on the couch, stiffens suddenly; then her whole body
jumps, scaring us all. "WHAT? What?" she asks, very frightened. "Geez,
don't scare me like that!" she says more calmly. "Oh — ow! Hurts. Hurts. I
banged my head."

"What did you bang it on?" Budd asks.

"The steering wheel," she says, and then, as if talking to someone else,
asks, "Whaddya want?" She sounds frightened again. "Oh, you scared me,"
she says. "You really scared me!"

Postconference Interview: Carol and Alice

405

"Who is this?" Budd asks. "Somebody stopped their car?"

Still frightened, Carol responds, "I don't know. I can't look. . . ." She is
close to tears. "Oh God, what am I doing to myself?"

"Is it a neighbor? A policeman? What does that person say to you?"

"He's just there. The light's back there. I can't look because it hurts. I
think I'm supposed to move. . . . Maybe I'm in his driveway or something?"
Carol begins to cry. "I can't drive! I can't!" she whimpers. "My head hurts so
bad! Please, just give me a minute, okay? I'll move in a minute!"

"Is the man's voice loud when he says to you you have to move?" Budd
asks.

"Nooo. I just think that's what he wants me to do."
"Do you see him gesture to move the car with his hand?"
"No."

"So how do you know he wants you to move?"

"Because he's standing there," Carol explains shakily.

"Maybe he's trying to help you," Budd suggests.

"I can't," she says, and then there is another sharp intake of breath as her
fear mounts. "How'd they do that?"

"Now, feel my hand here," Budd says, as he places his hand on hers.
"Feel my hand on yours. You can tighten your hand on mine — "

"It's them!"CzTo\ interrupts in a fierce, terrified whisper.

"You can tighten your hand if you want," Budd is saying. "It's what?
Who?"

"It's THEM!" Carol says loudly. "They're outside!" She moans with fear.
"Who is 'them'?" Budd asks.

Carol repeats, "It's them! 'It's those guys! Outside! I still can't see them. I
can't see. It hurts to look at them."

"Is that because of the bright lights?"

"Lights," she says, breathing hard. "Lights so bright. It's got — ohhh —
it's got a thing on it. There's other ones over there . . . other lights over there.
But they're not the same. I don't know if they're streetlights or not." Her
voice is quavering with fear. She seems to be looking more closely at the
scene playing out in her mind. "I don't think those are streetlights," she says,
her breathing still labored. "Ohhh . . . blue stuff . . . feels like ... a heat
lamp or something . . . burns. . . . Phew!"

"Burns all the way through the glass of your window?" Budd asks.

"I'm not in the car," Carol tells him. "I'm outside of the car. I'm stand-
ing somewhere. I'm standing on this road. The light is really bright. It
burns. . . . Oh, man! Feels like it's solid something. It's heavy."

"Do you see any other cars coming up and down the road that might
see this, too?"

406 CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

"No. It's dark. I can't see anything outside this thing. It's starting to burn
my face. Feels real hot. Owww, burns there!" she says. "Whew! Whew!" She
is panting from the heat. "Turn it off!" she tells them angrily. "Can't move.
I can't move. . . . Mmmff!" She appears to be struggling with someone or
something; her breathing rate accelerates.

"What's happening, Carol?" Budd asks gently.

She is panting now, lost in her vision.

"Carol," Budd says, "just tell me what's happening."

"I'm going up," she whispers. "Up somewhere . . . way up high."

"How'd you get way up high?"

"I don't know!" Carol says, and moans with fear.

"When you go way up high, where are you? When you stop moving?"

"I'm standing someplace," Carol says. "It's yellow in here."

"The surfaces are painted yellow?"

"I don't know — it feels yellow," Carol says. Her voice is steadier now,
calmer, as she tries to explain. "It feels yellow, gold. . . . The light felt blue;
this feels yellow. . . ." She is quiet for a moment, then again cries out in fear:
"Ohhh!. . .Ohhhhh!"

"What's happening?" Budd asks.

"I want to do this myself," Carol insists. She is not talking to Budd.
"What is it you want to do yourself?"

"They're going to make me ... go over there." Carol is breathing hard
again, as though she cannot get enough air in her lungs. "I don't want to go
over there because it's ... it has those things."

"Where is it that they want you to go?"

"They want me to go over to those tables ... to get on the table," Carol
says. "I don't do that anymore. ... It has things for the feet. ... I don't have
to do that anymore."

"What is it that has things for the feet?" Budd asks.

"Have to put your feet in there. . . . Round bars, and you have to put
your feet in there and then they close on your feet."

"Okay, you take a look at that," Budd tells her, "because you're going to
make a drawing for us later what that looks like."

"I don't have to do those anymore. I don't have to do that thing ever
again," Carol says, and takes a deep breath. "I don't have to do this," she says
again. Her voice is becoming increasingly tense. She is caught in her vision
like a swimmer in an undertow. "I don't have to do this anymore!" It is not
clear to whom she is speaking, but we assume she is arguing with the Be-
ings. "I don't want to — " I cannot make out what it is she doesn't want to
do. "I can do it," she says pleadingly, "I don't ever run away."

"What is it you can't do anymore?" Budd asks softly.

Postconference Interview: Carol and Alice

407

" I want to be able to move. I won't run away. / want to be able to move
myself!" Carol sounds distressed at first, then resigned. "Oh, okay . . .
okay . . . okay. I don't have to use those things," she says. "No, I'd really
rather not!"

"You'd really rather not do what?" Budd asks.

"I don't want to turn my head."

"They want you to turn your head?"

"No, they just said they want to turn my head. . . . No, I don't really
want to do that."

"Do what?" Budd asks.

"Because he's going to — " sharp inhale — "put that thing — " another
sharp inhale — "in my ear. Please don't put that thing in my ear?' Carol cries
out in pain. "They put something in my ear!" she whimpers, near tears.
"Please don't! I'll be good!" She is pleading now. "Please? . . . Please?" She be-
gins to cry. "I'll put my feet in there," she says, now crying hard. "I won't
hurt anybody! Let me get up!"

Budd squeezes Carol's hand. "Feel my hand in yours. I'm right here
with you," he tells her. "This has passed; we've been through this. This
ended. What did they want you to put your feet in? I don't understand
that."

Carol is crying so hard, it is difficult to understand her. Evidently, while
she was lying on the table, the Beings wanted her to put her feet into de-
vices similar to the stirrups a woman would rest her ankles in during a gy-
necological exam — except that once Carol's feet are in the Beings' restraints,
she is powerless to remove them.

"Have you ever seen anything like this elsewhere?" Budd asks.

"Yes. All the time," she says. She is having difficulty catching her breath.
"They put — they put my feet — in those things. They don't — let you — you
can't take — they don't — let you — take your feet out."

"So do you put your feet in these things?" <

"No! I don't want to do {(/"Carol cries. "They said they didn't have to do
that one now."

"Didn't they hurt your ear, though?"

" Yesssss!" she moans, still in tears.

"Did they do something to your ear?"

Carol does not answer.

"Feel my hand now," Budd says gently. "I want you to feel my hand. I
want you to put your hand around my hand and I want you to tighten up
on my hand. That lets you know I'm here with you. We're just looking back.
This is all over. It's ended. We're looking back to last year. It's not quite a
year ago. And so just right now as we look back, let's see what they're doing.

408 CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

Just looking back . . . they did something to your ear. What's that feel like?
What did they do?"

When Carol speaks, she is much quieter, calmer. "They stick a thing in
my ear. ... It hurts. ... It just gives me pictures and stuff. ..."

"What are the pictures it gives you?"

"Oceans and waves and things."

"Is that a nice picture?"

"No," she says.

"It doesn't make you feel good?"

"No, it doesn't do anything. It just doesn't look like real water . . . and
he says it is. Just a pattern of things. I'm supposed to follow the pat-
tern. ... To where?" she asks, seemingly of the Being. "I don't know what
that means, 'follow the pattern' — I don't know to where I'm supposed to fol-
low it. ... I just look at them."

"While you look at the pattern, let's look to your left and your right,"
Budd tells her. "Just out of the corner of your eye. Do you see anything to
your left or your right?"

"I don't know. ... I don't think my eyes are open."

"You're eyes aren't open?"

"Red colors. Red waves. Like blood," Carol says. "Not a real nice pic-
ture. And foamy stuff. Bubbles and foamy stuff. Looks like soap bubbles
and whipped cream or something . . . not ocean foam. . . . It's the wrong
kind of foam, guys," she tells the Beings.

And then, after a short pause, Carol announces, "I'm looking at a
picture."

"What is the picture of?" Budd asks.
"Funny scenes."

Carol describes a heronlike cartoon bird with short, thick legs whose
wings are on fire. She sees make-believe waves; a large, tailless mouse; and
something that, she says, "looks sort of like a bear," except that it has "fin-
gers instead of claws — short, stubby little fingers," very pale, tan, short fur,
and narrow, pointed ears, like a cat's.

"It's not really a bear," Carol explains. "It's another one of their car-
toons."

There is also something that, she says, is "supposed to be a baby bear, I
guess. He's really ugly, too, because he doesn't have any hair . . . bald as a bat."
"A bald bear," Budd says, making a note.

"Must be a newborn or something. Can't fool me, 'taint a bear ..." Carol
says; then, as if speaking to someone else, she adds, "Not particularly, no."
"What was that?" Budd asks.

Postconference Interview: Carol and Alice

409

"He wants to know if I want to hold the bear. ... I don't think so," she
tells the Being. Suddenly she cries out in pain, "OUCH! Careful!"
"What happened?" Budd asks.

"They moved that thing," Carol replies. "Take it out," she tells the
Being, "or don't move it. . . . It just hurts when he moves it."

She is referring to whatever it was that was put in her left ear. As long
as it is not moved she seems all right.

"Now we're back to water," Carol says. "Water water water everywhere
and not a drop to drink. . . . May I go now?" she asks, and a moment later
complains, "1 don't want to hold the baby bear. It's not a baby bear. I don't
know what it is. . . . No, I don't want to. You can't make me do that. . . ."

"What is it they want you to do?" Budd asks.

The Being again wants her to hold the baby bear, Carol explains. She
tells him she doesn't want to and that it's "not real, anyway." But the Being
evidently insists the bear is real. There is a moment of silence, and then
Carol worriedly says, "Oh, ohhhh, they're going to take that thing out. I hate
this part!"

"What thing are they taking out?"' Budd asks her.

"They're going to take that thing out of myyy — " Carol takes a quick,
deep breath — "EARRRR!" she says, exhaling loudly. "Care-fullll!"

Budd starts to say, "My hand's coming down — "

But Carol doesn't hear him. " Care-fiillll!" she says tensely. She braces
herself against the pain, then sags with relief. "Ohhhh, yeah, ohhhh," she
says. "Thank you very much. Can I go now?" She heaves a big sigh. "Yeah,
okay. . . . Okay!" she says more adamantly. "Whew!" And then, very quietly,
she asks again, "Can I go now?"

"I'm sorry?" Budd says, not sure he heard her.

" 'Well, excuuuse meee,' " she says sarcastically, then cries out, " Ouchf
She flicks at something near her ear.
"What's happening?"

"Leave it alone!" Carol says with almost a giggle. "He's playing with my
earrings. . . ."

"Who's playing with your earrings?"

"This guy over here. I don't know who he is. He's not mine. He's some-
body else's."

"What's he look like?"

"I can't see him from here," Carol says, adding, "He's not talking to me,
so he's not mine." There is a pause; then Carol says, "Give them back!"
"Did he take them off?"

"Took them off," she says. " Give them back!" she says more insistently.

410 CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

"Just leave him alone," Budd says. "You'll get them back."
Carol takes a deep breath.

"Now what I want you to do as best you can is look around," Budd tells
her. 'You've seen this bear thing, and we've seen that there was somebody
there fooling with your ears — let's look around and see if you can see any-
body else."

"There's one, I know him. He's down on the left side behind the box,"
Carol says. "And there's a guy I know down on my right. . . . He's the one
that talks to me."

"Any other people watching you there?"

"I don't see them. I'm in a little space this time. Not a big space."
There is a long pause, and then Carol makes a face. "Mmm, yech!"
"What's happening?"

" Yech!" she says again, her face screwed up with disgust. "They made
me — yech! — taste this stuff."
"What stuff?"

"Blyah!"she says. She licks her lips and makes little sounds as if she were
trying to get rid of something stuck to her palate. "Gross-tasting stuff!"

"What is the stuff?" Budd asks. "Something you want to eat there?
Drink there?"

"No, they give you stuff," Carol tells him. "Stick it in your mouth."
"What does it taste like?"

"Shit," she says matter-of-factly, and makes another face. "Yech!"

She describes the substance as a thick liquid. She does not know what
color it is, because she cannot see it before it is put in her mouth. Budd asks
her if it has a name, and she says, "No, it's just 'Take this.' 'Eat this.' "

Whatever the substance is, Carol tells us, it makes her sick. It is not the
first time they have given it to her, she tells us; she has been forced to swal-
low it often.

"What's it for?" Budd asks her.

"I don't know," Carol says. "They don't tell me. ... It doesn't do any
good to ask anyway. ... I tried not to swallow it one time. But it made me
sick when I couldn't swallow it and they made me swallow everything." She
tells Budd that even though it had made her sick, they forced her to take
more and keep it down. "I won't do that anymore!" Carol says firmly.

"Next time, if that happens," Budd tells her, "if you feel like it, you can
throw up on them. That's okay to do."

"Yuck!" Carol says. "It's just really bad stuff. . . ." She is silent for a mo-
ment, then says, "Oh, c'mon. . . . May I go home now?" There is another
brief pause, then she tells us, "I guess they're going to let me go home now.
Goody! Goody-goody. Oh, goody. . . . Okay. . . . Yeah, yeah, yeah," she

Postconference Interview: Carol and Alice

4 1 1

says, apparently to the Beings. "Yeah . . . okay." There is a trace of appre-
hension in her voice.

"What's happening?" Budd asks. "Is it just before they let you go?"

"They're trying to tell me my mother's over there," Carol says, now
clearly nervous. "They're saying she wants me to hold the bear."

"Your mother wants you to hold the bear?"

"My mother's not there!" she tells the Being. "It's silly! I'm not going to
hold the bear."

Budd asks, "Is this the same bear they showed you earlier?"
"I don't know," she says. "I can't see any bear."
"The bear you saw earlier, was it as big as a cat?"
"I don't know. I guess. I don't know," she says.
"Do they give a name to the bear?" Budd asks.

"No," she says, shaking her head. "Just 'a baby bear.' But it's not a baby
bear. . . . Hmmm, yeahhh, okay," she says, and there is a sharp intake of
breath.

" 'Okay' what?" Budd asks her.

"Oh, just going down there," she says with another quick inhale. " Okay!
Okay! . . . Ohhhhh, one of these days they're going to drop me!"
"Going down where? How do you go down?"

"Going down the thing, that thick stuff — ohhhh," she moans. "Go
down in this light. In this heavy thing. Thick stuff. And it just goes down
and you just go with it."

"What do you see when you go down?"

"Nothing. It's just light. Everything is in light. And when you get down
there it's hard . . . hard to get your feet. Ohhhhh," Carol moans. "I feel sick."
"Where are you now?"
"In the road."
"Where's your car?"

"Right behind me. . . . Got to get in I feel like I'm going to be

sick," she says, clutching her stomach. "Oh, geez, I feel so sick! I feel so sick!
Oh, wow! I've got to get home. Got-to-get-home. Got-to-get-home. Got-
to-get-home," she chants. "Whew! Almost missed that one!"

"Missed what?" Budd asks.

"The turn. Almost missed the turn, going so fast. Got to slow
down . . . slow down ... I feel like I need to — oh, God" she says with in-
creasing concern, "I have to throw up. Whew! Oh, boy. I have to stop! I have
to throw up."

She emits a low moan, and Budd, realizing Carol really is about be sick,
urgently tells her, "We're going to turn that nausea down! We're going to
turn that nausea down!"

412 CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

Carol, lying on the couch, gags.

"My hand's coming right over your head now. Feel my hand on your
head. Okay? That's calming you down. You're not going to have to throw
up now. You did then, but not now. You're okay now," Budd says, and Carol
gags again. "You don't have to throw up now, "he says even more insistently.
"That was then. In the past. Now you're okay. Feel my hand on your fore-
head. Now you're okay. ..."

Carol's breathing slowly returns to normal.

"Yes," Budd says, "you're feeling better. We just want to get home. Let's
just drive home in a real hurry. Do you see the lights of the house down
there, driving along?"
Yes.

Carol sees the farmhouse lights and pulls into the garage. "Just go in-
side! Go inside!" she tells herself.

Budd asks if Alice is awake; Carol says Alice is in bed. And then, speak-
ing very quickly, nervously, she tells him that Alice's sister Grace "doesn't
know what's wrong. Grace's all upset. Because something's wrong. ... I
don't know what's wrong," she says to Grace.

"I can't tell her what's wrong. I don't know what's wrong," she tells
Budd, then, addressing Grace again, says, "Something's wrong. Don't feel
good. I got — my ears are bleeding! I don't know what's wrong." There is ris-
ing panic in her voice. " What's wrong?\ don't know what's happened! Some-
thing happened!"

"What does Grace say to you?" Budd asks.

"She doesn't know what's wrong," Carol says, and then to Grace she
says, "It's okay. I just got scared for some reason. . . . Ohh, what's wrong
with me? / don't understand what's wrong!" She stirs restlessly on the couch.
"Something happened. What happened?" she asks agitatedly. "Something
happened. Something . . . happened. I don't understand . . . what hap-
pened! I don't understand why I can't remember!"

"Okay," Budd says gently, "let's just go upstairs to bed and relax."

"I don't feel good," Carol moans.

"Feeling better? Getting into bed, just relaxing?"

"What happened to me?" Carol asks in a soft voice.

"Here's what I want you to do: Take two easy, deep breaths. Fill your
lungs," he tells her.

Carol does what he asks.

"That's good. Just take another deep breath," Budd tells her. He gets
Carol breathing deeply. "Ohhh, that's good, you're relaxed," he says. "Your
body relaxes. . . . Your body relaxes. . . . Easy, deep breath. . . . Your body's
relaxing. . . . Feeling sleepy. . . . Body's relaxing. . . . Feeling sleepy. . . .

Postconference Interview: Carol and Alice

413

"In just a few minutes now," he continues, "I'm going to wake you up.
When you wake up, you'll remember everything you need to remember of
this incident — things that maybe you haven't even mentioned. When you
wake up, you'll feel a sense of relief. Those deep breaths have calmed your
body. You won't be sick. You'll just wake up feeling a little tired, remember-
ing the experience as you need to remember it."

Budd tells Carol that the emotion of tonight's experience is over and she
is to put it behind her.

And then, with increasing volume, Budd tells her, "Five, you are start-
ing to wake up. . . .

"Four, you're waking up. . . .

"Three, almost awake. . . .
Iwo. . . .

He pauses for a moment, then says, "One, fully awake."

For a minute or so, Carol just lies there with her eyes closed, not speak-
ing, not moving. Then she opens her eyes and says, "I have an earache."

"Well, that will go away slowly," Budd tells her. "It's just a trace memory."

He looks down at Carol, who still hasn't tried to stir from the couch.
"That wasn't too pleasant, was it?" he says.

"No," she says. She thinks about the experience for a moment, then
pushes herself up into a sitting position. "I don't know what that baby bear
was! Looked like a — I don't know what it looked like! They said it was a
baby bear, but I know it wasn't a bear."

"Do you think you ever held the baby bear?" Budd asks.

"No, I didn't," she says firmly. "It was like a cartoon. How can you hold
a cartoon? It was dumb."

Budd asks her about the Being who had been playing with her earrings.

"He took them out and he was playing with them! He was doing this,"
she says, jiggling her silver pendant earrings back and forth, "and pulling on
them and yanking on them, and I'm going, 'Quit it! What are you doing
over there?' I think he was just playing with them like a child who had never
seen anything like them before and was curious and wanted to examine
them. Anyway, it was quite painful, the playing and jerking them and stuff."

Budd explains he didn't want to continue the hypnosis session to cover
the January 2 Christmas-wrapping-paper incident because he didn't think
Carol would have been up to it.

"It would have been too much," Carol agrees. "I was so sick to my stom-
ach." She makes a face at the memory. "I have to describe something to you,"
she tells us. "When they give you this stuff, it's so foul — you're forced to swal-
low it, first of all; you can't help it. They stick it in your mouth; you have to
swallow it. And when you swallow, it's so foul-tasting your throat closes up

414 CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

and your immediate response is to reject it, to vomit it up. But," she contin-
ues, "if you try to vomit it up, it's like they do something to you so that it
forces your whole throat to open up and everything goes back down. It's like
an involuntary reaction. And they make this happen by putting their hand
over your mouth or something. They don't let you throw up. And your stom-
ach is rolling all the time and boiling aroundand you feel God-awful.

"And you have those awful emotional swings!" Carol continues. "I get
in there and first I'm scared. It's like this never happened before. And then
you realize that, well, maybe it has happened before; but this part hasn't. Or
maybe it happened, but it's somewhere else that it happened. And then
you're in the middle of being afraid about something when they make you
angry about something. And you go from being mad to something else:
upset, or hurt, or emotionally injured. It just belts you around until you get
tired and can't fight it anymore."

Budd asks her more about the thick liquid she was forced to swallow.
She says she had no sense of its color, but it tasted "sort of pinkish." She says,
"They just put it in your mouth. Either it's on the end of a finger or it's in
a tube."

She describes the ankle restraint as an inverted U-shaped bar device that
rose up from the end of the table and "falls over on the side of the foot to
lock it in with the legs spread. It encloses the foot from behind, and that's
it, you're not moving anywhere."

The cartoon images were "like watching a movie in the dark," she ex-
plains. "It was all-encompassing. Started with waves — supposed to be ocean
waves? It was too thick, Jell-O-y, and moving too slow to be water. I got the
impression that that was supposed to relax me. Which it sort of did. White
noise. You sort of get hypnotized by the motion. And then I saw foam and
stuff, different colors — red, then blue. Like a cartoon. Then blah grayish-
brown, and stuff would bubble up from the bottom — it looked like some-
body spilled whipped cream that was going watery. The image would start
to be stupid, and then it would go away. The image would just go blank. It
wouldn't go dark; it just goes blank. And then there was this birdlike thing
with its wings on fire. Wings flapping, but they were on fire. And it looked
like a cartoon. Fire looked real, but the bird didn't. I wasn't worried about
the bird having its wings on fire because it wasn't a real bird."

"Carol, at the end when you are saying that you don't want to hold the
bear, are you still with your eyes closed?" I ask.

"I was sitting up on the table," she says.

"So when they say your mother wants you to hold the bear — "

"It's not 'they,' " she corrects me. "It's one. There's only one who ever
talks to me. He said, 'Your mother wants you to hold the baby bear.' And I

Postconference Interview: Carol and Alice

415

said, 'I'm not holding the baby bear and that's not my mother. There's no
mother. My mother's not here. There is no baby bear. I'm not holding a
baby bear.'

"It was an image placed in my mind somehow," she explains. "There
was nothing to judge its size by, because there was nothing next to it. The
bear didn't have claws; it had stubby little fingers that it walked on like an
ape. But it was built sort of like a bear, except that it had sharp, pointed ears
sort of like a cat. But it did have a snout. . . ." She pauses, reflecting on the
image, then adds, "And there was no way to know its sex."

"Did it have short hair? Long hair?" Budd asks.

"Real short hair. Downy. You could sort of see the skin through it. It was
like they were trying to make a newborn cub; it was pinkish. The mother
was a beige color, very pale."

"Did you smell an animal smell?" I ask.

"There wasn't any smell at all," Carol says.

It is apparent after some more discussion that there is nothing in Carol's
background to suggest any reason for the bear image at all.

We never do cover the wrapping-paper incident that weekend. And the
following morning, Carol and Alice take a train back to Washington and re-
turn to their farm. I drive back to my home in Connecticut.

So what does this all mean?

CHAPTER XX

Various Theories

Nothing exists except atoms and empty space; everything else is
opinion.

— Democritus,
362 B.C.

New opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without
any other reason but because they are not already common.

— John Locke,

An Essay Concerning Human Understanding,
1690

Reality? We don't got to show you no steeeeenking reality.

— Physicist Nick Herbert,
in conversation, 1990

"The central paradox of human-alien interaction is the continuing unsolv-
ability of the UFO phenomenon by conventional means and models, cou-
pled with the continuing manifestations of the phenomenon in increasingly
bizarre forms." 1 Thus Keith Thompson, the least tabloid and most scholarly
of the phenomenon's journalists, sums up the dilemma confronting anyone
attempting to write about this subject today.

The genesis of the debate over whether UFOs are extraterrestrial space-
craft or not lies in Kenneth Arnold's 1947 sighting of nine bright shining ob-
jects flying "like a saucer would if you skipped it across water." 2 And for
nearly fifty years now, neither the believers nor the skeptics have budged
much from their original points of view.

Believers still maintain that UFOs are physically real, solid, metallic-
like craft piloted by superior creatures who, through their mastery of some
form of advanced (as yet undiscovered by us) system of propulsion, are able

Various Theories

4 1 7

to transport themselves through space from their galaxy to ours at velocities
that defy the physical laws of the universe as we understand them. Further-
more, once on Earth, these craft are capable of performing such acrobatic
shifts in direction and fantastic feats of acceleration and deceleration that
were they composed of terrestrial materials, they would burn up or break up
in our atmosphere and gravity.

Skeptics still say it's all hogwash. The immutable laws of physics dictate
no material object can approach the speed of light; therefore, because of the
vastness of our universe, no extraterrestrial beings could reach us without
traveling tens of thousands of Earth years to get here.

The advent of the abduction phenomenon has served only to enlarge
the debate to include such technological riddles as: How do these alien be-
ings convey themselves and their human victims through solid roofs, win-
dows, and walls? How are they able to levitate people up beams of light?
How do they communicate telepathically? How are they able to find their
victims again and again? And if tiny artificial objects are in fact being im-
planted in human bodies, what purpose do they serve?

In short, "What is going on?" and "What do they want from us?" have
been added to "Where are they from?"

Initially, many attending the M.I.T. conference seemed satisfied that
what is going on is nothing more or less than what the experiences have
been saying is going on: Human beings are being abducted by alien crea-
tures into UFOs, where medical procedures are being performed on them
prior to their being returned to Earth. And what these beings want from us
is our participation, willing or not, in a breeding program, the result of
which is the creation of hybrid alien/human offspring.

The skeptics demand hard evidence; the believers show them blurry pho-
tographs, landing trace scorch marks, puncture wounds, scoop marks, scars.

Philip J. Klass, publisher of the Skeptics U.F.O. Newsletter (and the
media's official skeptic), thinks all abductees are "people seeking celebrity
status . . . little nobodies." 3

Professor of psychiatry John E. Mack, M.D. (the media's latest official
"Harvard crazy": Timothy Leary cum Wilhelm Reich) emphasizes the re-
markable lengths to which abductees go to protect their anonymity.

Clearly, whatever is happening to the abductees, it is something that de-
fies conventional explanations.

Of course I have reservations about the origins of Carol's and Alice's ab-
duction accounts; of course there were moments when I felt Budd Hopkins
might have been "leading" them; of course the stories they were telling were
so foreign to my concept of "reality" that I did not believe there was any way
they could be true. And yet . . .

4 1 8

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

And yet as I watched Carol and Alice under hypnosis flail about and
pound Budd Hopkins's couch in rage and frustration, heard them cry out
in terror, weep in sorrow, as I witnessed the two reliving their abduction
episodes, their emotions appeared entirely genuine to me.

In his 1987 book, Intruders, Budd Hopkins admitted his own "belief
system" had been sorely strained by the abduction cases he had been inves-
tigating. "Our minds can only go so far," he wrote, "and then a kind of self-
imposed censorship takes over." 4

But no amount of self-imposed censorship can dissipate what John E.
Mack referred to as the "authenticity, believability, and nature" of the ab-
ductees themselves. "That was the single most powerful thing for me," he
told me in Boston. "Here were people otherwise quite ordinary, unremark-
able, reporting with full sincerity and in a most authentic way these extra-
ordinary experiences which they did not want to believe were so."

Critics of the phenomenon will attribute the abductee's story to his or
her desire to please the hypnotist by telling him what he wants to hear. But
that suggestion, Mack points out, "fails to take into account how disturb-
ing abductions are to the experiences and how intense the resistance is to
bringing what they have gone through back into consciousness, or to ac-
cepting the reality of what they have gone through at all. . . . Furthermore,
abductees are particularly unsuggestible," Mack insists. "To meet the
above criticisms I and other investigators have tried repeatedly to trick ab-
ductees by suggesting specific elements — hair on the aliens, corners in the
rooms on the ships, for example. Proponents of the controversial 'false
memory syndrome' as an explanation for abduction memories need to ac-
count for this." 5

In addition any theory that attempts to explain the abduction phe-
nomenon must still account for what Mack refers to as its "five basic di-
mensions":

1. The high degree of consistency of detailed abduction accounts, re-
ported with emotion appropriate to actual experiences, told by appar-
ently reliable observers.

2. The absence of psychiatric illness or other apparent psychological or
emotional factors that could account for what is being reported.

3. The physical changes and lesions affecting the bodies of the experi-
ences, which follow no evident psychodynamic pattern.

4. The association with UFOs witnessed independently by others while
abductions are taking place (which the abductee may not see).

5. The reports of abductions by children as young as two or three years
of age. 6

Various Theories

419

Budd Hopkins quotes a letter he received from a young Minnesota
woman who experienced abductions as a child and adult. The intelligence
and articulateness with which she was able to summarize her experience
seems typical of abductees:

For most of us it began with the memories. Though some of us recalled
parts or all of our experiences, it was more common for us to seek them
out where they were — buried in a form of amnesia. Often we did this
through hypnosis, which was, for many of us, a new experience. And what
mixed feelings we had as we faced those memories! Almost without ex-
ception we felt terrified as we relived these traumatic events, a sense of
being overwhelmed by their impact. But there was also disbelief. This can't
be real. I must be dreaming. This isn't happening. Thus began the vacillation
and self-doubt, the alternating periods of skepticism and belief as we tried
to incorporate our memories into our sense of who we are and what we
know. We often felt crazy; we continued our search for the "real" expla-
nation. We tried to figure out what was wrong with us that these images
were surfacing. Why is my mind doing this to me?

And there was the problem of talking about our experiences with oth-
ers. Many of our friends were skeptics, of course, and though it hurt us
not to be believed, what could we expect? We were still skeptics ourselves
at times, or probably had been in the past. The responses we got from oth-
ers mirrored our own. The people we talked to believed us and doubted
us, they were confused and looked for other explanations just as we had.
Many were rigid in their denial of even the slightest possibility of abduc-
tions, and whatever words they used the underlying message was certainly
clear, I know better than you what is real and what isn't. I'm right and you're
wrong. We felt caught in the prison of a vicious circle that seemed to be
imposed on us as abductees by a skeptical society:

Why do you believe you were abducted?

You believe it because you're crazy.

How do we know you're crazy?

Because you believe you were abducted!

Our own belief was less an intellectual process than an experiential
one, and what finally dawned on us was that others had no proof the ab-
ductions weren't iez\.

Her letter concluded, "Nothing in life had prepared us for these expe-
riences, and it all seemed impossible to comprehend." 7

"Precisely because the UFO vision seems absurd to ordinary, non-
initiated consciousness," Thompson points out, "the experience (and the
one who had had it) will be ridiculed by the collective. With feelings of
rejection as insult added to the injury of the reality shattering UFO exp'e-

420

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

rience, the UFO initiate is tempted to relieve the feeling of being rendered
less than ordinary by pretending to be .sa^r-ordinary, sometimes taking on
the role of a cosmic prophet who has glimpsed the new cosmic horizon." 8

But, as Thompson noted in Angels and Aliens: UFOs and the Mythic
Imagination, his erudite examination of the UFO phenomenon, the aliens
stopped at Communion author Whitley Strieber's house "not because they
intended to anoint him avatar of the New Age, nor even to urge him to
write a best-selling confessional account of his experiences," 9 but, according
to Strieber, because they saw a light burning in his living-room window.

So much for Strieber's ego.

Still, many of the abductees feel they have been chosen, singled out for
some unknown purpose to perform some unexpressed function. Both Carol
and Alice, under hypnosis, sensed that their bodies had been used for alien
procreation. And John Mack now appears to agree with Budd Hopkins and
David Jacobs when he writes in Abduction (1994) that the "abduction phe-
nomenon is in some central way involved in a breeding program in the cre-
ation of alien/hybrid offspring." 10 But, Mack goes on to suggest, "for most
abductees the hybridization has occurred simultaneously with an enlighten-
ment imparted by the alien beings that has brought home forcibly to them
the failure of the human experiment in its present form." He continues:

Abduction experiencers come to feel deeply that the death of human be-
ings and countless other species will occur on a vast scale if we continue
on our present course and that some sort of new life-form must evolve if
the human biological and spiritual essence is to be preserved.

Investigators who perceive the UFO abduction phenomenon from an
adversarial perspective, tend to interpret its meaning one-sidedly. The
aliens are using us, the argument goes, for their own purposes, replenish-
ing their genetic stock at our expense after some sort of holocaust on their
own planet. If they make us feel that there is something worthwhile about
this whole process, this is the result of deception. I would not say that the
aliens never resort to deception to hide their purposes, but the above ar-
gument is, in my view, too narrow or linear an interpretation.

My own impression is that we may be witnessing something far more
complex, namely an awkward joining of two species, engineered by an in-
telligence we are unable to fathom, for a purpose that serves both our
goals with difficulties for each. I base this view on the evidence presented
by the abductees themselves."

John Mack's abductees have spoken of aliens "breaking through from
another dimension," as he reported, "through a 'slit' or 'crack' in some sort
of barrier, entering our world from 'beyond the veil.' " And Mack now be-

Various Theories

42 1

lieves that "consciousness expansion and personal transformation is a basic
aspect of the abduction phenomenon. I have come to this conclusion from
noting in case after case the extent to which the information communicated
by alien beings to experiencers is fundamentally about the need for a change
in human consciousness and our relationship to the earth and one an-
other." 12

And it is the abductees' repeatedly voiced recognition of this insistent
need for a change that causes many of the more open-minded scholars and
investigators in the UFO movement to perceive the alien-abduction phe-
nomenon as some sort of evolutionary prod — "as much of a prod to our
next level of consciousness," Thompson suggests, "as rapidly blooming sex-
ual urges are a prod to a teen-ager's move from childhood to adolescence.
Both represent a death of a previous naive way of being. The privilege of
being young — a young person, a young planet, a young soul — is believing
we can remain innocent forever." 13

Anne, an abductee, told John Mack, "Something else is interested in us
that we don't want to know about. This is happening. It's not just a happy
little dream where you can feel like you're important. This is really a respon-
sibility, and things that you don't want to see happen are going to happen." 14

Virtually all of Mack's abductees, he writes, "have demonstrated a com-
mitment to changing their relationship to the earth, of living more gently
on it or in greater harmony with the other creatures that live here." 15 Such
a commitment, of course, is hardly new. And alien-generated concerns over
our destruction of the planet had surfaced as a parallel communication at
the M.I.T. conference, I knew; but it was not until after the conference that
I learned there were those in the UFO movement who had been insisting
that the conservation of our planet has been the primary consideration of
our alien visitors and that both this message and its messengers have been
around for a long, long time.

"Whatever the visitors are," Whitley Strieber writes in Transformation,
his 1988 sequel to Communion, "I suspect they have been responsible for
much paranormal phenomena, ranging from the appearance of gods, an-
gels, fairies, ghosts, and miraculous beings to the landing of UFOs in the
backyards of America." And then — in a hypothesis whose breathtaking leap
echoes the top-secret presidential-briefing-paper information Linda Moul-
ton Howe gleaned from her interview with the Air Force security officer at
Kirtland Air Force Base — Strieber continues:

It may be, that what happened to Mohammed in his cave and to Christ
in Egypt, to Buddha in his youth and to all of our great prophets and
seers, was an exalted version of the same humble experience that causes a

422

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

flying saucer to traverse the sky or a visitor to appear in a bedroom or light
to fill a circle of friends.

It should not be forgotten that the visitors — if I am right about
them — represent the most powerful of all forces acting in human culture.
They may £f extraterrestrials managing the evolution of the human mind.
Or they may represent the presence of mind on another level of being.
Perhaps our fate is eventually to leave the physical world altogether and
join them in that strange hyper-reality from which they seem to emerge."

If we can accept the possibility that these Beings — whatever form they
may take — have been in contact with us for tens of thousands of years, then
we should not discard the possibility that, in Strieber's words, "we may very
well be something different from what we believe ourselves to be, on this
earth for reasons that may not yet be known to us, the understanding of
which will be an immense challenge." 17

"We can try to make the phenomenon fit the world as we have known
it," John E. Mack writes, "jamming it into a kind of procrustean bed of con-
sensus reality. Or we can acknowledge that the world might be other than
we have known it. ... I have spent countless hours trying to find alterna-
tive explanations that would not require the major shift in my worldview
that I have had to face. But," Mack concludes, "no familiar theory or ex-
planation has come even close to accounting for the basic features of the ab-
duction phenomenon. In short, it is what it is, though the ultimate source
of these experiences remains a mystery." 18

The least demanding "shift in worldview" required by this phenome-
non asks only that we extend those boundaries that we deem to be the lim-
its of technology. In other words, just because UFOs and their occupants
defy our laws of physics does not mean there are not further laws of physics
we have not as yet discovered or do not as yet comprehend. Technology is
constantly advancing; stunning scientific achievements, therefore, should
not surprise us.*

Nor should the paradigm shift required by acknowledging that there
might be other intelligent beings in the universe set us back on our heels.
After all, who today could argue convincingly that our sun is the only ce-

* Although, of course, they sometimes do. History is filled with examples of what J.
Allen Hynek called "temporal provincialism": In 1895, for example, Lord Kelvin, the British
physicist, stated that "heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible." In 1923, Nobel Prize
physicist Robert Millikan announced, "There is no likelihood that man can ever tap the
power of the atom." And in 1932 University of Chicago astronomer Dr. F. R. Moulton ex-
pressed his opinion that "there is no hope for the fanciful idea of reaching the moon because
of insurmountable barriers to escaping the earth's gravity.""

Various Theories

423

lestial object about which planets orbit, or that Earth is the only planet ca-
pable of sustaining life?

No, the shift demanded by the UFO phenomenon that is so difficult is
the one that forces us to consider that there might exist simultaneous other
realities; further, that it is during, or within, some sort of overlapping of
these realities that alien abductions occur. And it is this hypothesis that
sends us reeling backwards to confront the original question raised by the
UFO phenomenon: Where do they come from?

Early ufologists were about evenly divided between those who concen-
trated their efforts on the discovery and analysis of "hard evidence" — the
photographs, the landing traces, changes in soil composition, etc. — and
those who focused upon eyewitness reports, close encounters of the third
and fourth kinds.

But then in the 1960s there emerged a third group of ufologists who were
part historians, part folklorists, part scholars, and maybe even part dreamers.
They were the students of the phenomenon who had come to suspect that
there might be parallels between contemporary UFO reports and accounts
of human confrontations with mysterious beings since earliest times.

In this third group was Jacques Vallee, then a young French graduate
student and computer scientist. Another member, I learned to my surprise,
was longtime Air Force consultant J. Allen Hynek, with whom Vallee had
become acquainted in i960 while Hynek was teaching at Northwestern
University. (Vallee is allegedly the real-life figure upon whom Steven Spiel-
berg based the French-speaking UFO scientist, played by Francois Truffaut
in Close Encounters of the Third Kind)

In the mid-1960s Vallee wrote Anatomy of a Phenomenon, a book still
considered one of the most sophisticated scientifically based explorations
into the UFO phenomenon. In it he showed he was less interested in ex-
plaining UFOs than he was in analyzing them. Keith Thompson attributes
Vallee's decision to turn away from mainstream UFO research's concentra-
tion on finding a simple, uncomplicated explanation for UFOs to an inci-
dent that occurred in 1961 while Vallee was working with the French Satellite
Tracking Program, part of a worldwide research network that reported to the
Smithsonian Astronomical Observatory. According to Thompson:

One night [Vallee] and his coworkers tracked an elusive object that be-
haved abnormally for a satellite yet seemed not to be an airplane or a
lighted balloon. Vallee felt the excitement of knowing he and his col-
leagues were on to something. But before they could feed their data on this
object into the computer for analysis, their supervisor confiscated and
erased the tape. The object no longer existed, for all intents and purposes.

424

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

For Vallee, the unknown (and now forever lost) object on the radar
screen immediately paled in significance compared to the deliberate sup-
pression of scientific evidence he had just witnessed. It was in trying to un-
derstand the reflexive action of his supervisor — who saw himself as a
scientist no less than Vallee and his colleagues saw themselves as scien-
tists — that Vallee became truly interested in the UFO phenomenon. As
his study continued, he came to believe "that one should not try to prove
that UFOs constitute a new phenomenon of an unknown, possibly arti-
ficial nature before one has made an attempt to understand why such vi-
olent reactions are provoked by the thought of . . . contact with our
civilization by nonhuman knowledge for nonhuman purposes, possibly
prompted by nonhuman emotions and perceptions."

In 1969, Vallee the consummate scientist surprised many of his col-
leagues with his suggestion that UFOs may not be a "scientific" problem
after all, for "modern science rules over a narrow universe, one particular
variation on an infinite theme." Likewise, Vallee said, "ufology has be-
come such a narrow field of specialization that the experts have no time
left for the general culture." He called on his colleagues to join him in
moving beyond the limited — and increasingly obsessional — concern with
whether UFOs are extraterrestrial in origin, and to begin probing the
UFO phenomenon's impact on culture and our collective psyches. 20

Vallee's call to look in other directions was an outgrowth of ideas he had
shared with, among others, J. Allen Hynek, who later explained, "It began to
seem to us that rather than being 'extraterrestrial' in any simple sense, UFOs
could well be part of the same larger intelligence which has shaped the tap-
estry of religion and mythology since the dawn of human consciousness." 21

In his two books Passport to Magonia(i<)6<)) and Dimensions: A Casebook
of Alien Contact (1988), Jacques Vallee moved beyond discussing the inter-
national history of UFOs to analyze the world's anthropological, religious,
folkloric, mythic, and literary fables, those "larger mechanisms," as Thomp-
son calls them, "that generate religious visions, mystical raptures, appear-
ances by supernatural creatures, and flying saucers — all relying on the same
processes and mechanisms, all sharing similar characteristics and effects on
the human observer, depending on the predominant belief structure of a given
culture [Thompson's italics] . 22

In other words, observers would see what their times and environment
prepared them to believe they might see. Take, for example, Ezekiel's Old
Testament vision:

And I looked, and behold, a whirlwind came out of the north, a great
cloud, and a fire infolding itself, and a brightness was about it, and out of
the midst thereof as the colour of amber, out of the midst of the fire.

Various Theories

425

Also out of the midst thereof, came the likeness of four living crea-
tures. And this was their appearance, they had the likeness of a man.

And every one had four faces, and every one had four wings.

And their feet were straight feet; and the sole of their feet was like the
sole of a calP s foot; and they sparkled like the colour of burnished brass. 23

An admirer of Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind might see
the same vision and report:

I looked up at the churning lightning-filled clouds to the north and saw
a huge, bright, fiery-orange, rotating object emerge; it was the mother
ship! Four smaller scout craft emerged from the Mother ship. They were
star-shaped: like a man with his arms and legs outstretched. Each craft
had four windows and four wings. Their landing gear pointed straight
down, then flattened out into pads. The craft had a polished metallic ap-
pearance. . . .

With a little imagination, Ezekiel's vision can be interpreted to mean
that he saw, in addition to the huge mother ship and small starships, some
large, cupolated discs with windows spaced above their rotating rims; that
when the craft moved, they made deep, resonant noises, but when hovering
they made no sound; and that throughout the period these discs and scout
craft were darting about, the huge, towering mother ship remained high
above them — the bright orange light shining from its interior so brilliant,
Ezekiel tells us, he collapsed in awe:

And he said unto me, Son of man, stand upon thy feet, and I will speak
unto thee.

And the spirit entered into me when he spake unto me, and set me
upon my feet, that I heard him that spake unto me.

Then the spirit took me up, and I heard behind me a voice of great
rushing. . . .

I heard also the noise of the wings of the living creatures that touched
one another, and the noise of the wheels over against them, and a noise of
a great rushing.

So the spirit lifted me up, and took me away. . . . 24

The beings spoke to Ezekiel telepathically, telling him to stand up and
to not be afraid. And then they abducted him.

In 1830 an American wrote of the religious vision he himself had expe-
rienced: "I saw a pillar of light exactly over my head, above the brightness
of the sun, which descended gradually until it fell upon me. When the light
rested on me I saw two personages, whose brightness and glory defy all de-

426

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

scriptions, standing above me in the air. One of them spoke to me." 25 The
experiencer, Joseph Smith, went on to found the Mormon Church.

During the Middle Ages, Western man persistently believed he was
under the scrutiny of aerial Beings who lived in the skies. In his Introduc-
tion to Plutarch's Lives, A H. Clough includes this account of the interces-
sion by Agobard, the respected archbishop of Lyons, in behalf of three men
and a woman who stood accused by a mob of having just landed in a "cloud-
ship" from a legendary celestial region known as Magonia:

One day, among other instances, it chanced at Lyons that three men and
a woman were seen descending from . . . wonderfully constructed aerial
ships, whose flying squadrons roved at the will of the Zephyrs. . . . The
entire city gathered around them, crying out that they were magi-
cians. ... In vain the four innocents sought to vindicate themselves by
saying that they were their own country-folk, and had been carried away
a short time since by miraculous men who had shown them unheard-of
marvels. . . . The frenzied populace paid no heed to their defense, and
were on the point of casting them into the fire, when the worthy Agobard,
Bishop of Lyons . . . came running at the noise, and having heard the ac-
cusations of the people and the defense of the accused, gravely pro-
nounced that ... it was not true that these men had fallen from the sky,
and what they said they had seen there was impossible. 26

During the battle between the Saxons and the Franks at Sigisburg in
A.D., 776 fiery aerial phenomena appeared overhead in the shape of military
shields.

In A.D. 1118 Emperor Constantine observed a fiery cross in the sky along
with the message "In this sign you shall conquer."

German scholar Hartmann Schaeden in 1493 published an account of a
remarkable fiery sphere he observed fly a straight line across the sky from
south to east, then turn west directly toward the setting sun. (A contempo-
rary illustration of this phenomenon depicted a cigar-shaped device sur-
rounded by flames against a blue sky.)

Once in Nuremberg in 1561 and three times in Basel in 1566, numerous
large black discs were observed in the sky. According to Swiss scholar
Samuel Coccius, who witnessed the phenomenon: "Suddenly, they started
racing towards the sun with great speed, with some turned toward each
other as though in combat. Some were seen to turn fiery red and then they
vanished." 27 Other witnesses reported observing large aerial cylinders out of
which came spheres and discs that performed mock aerial battles.

Many of these sightings were witnessed by thousands who interpreted
them as religious miracles or omens.

Various Theories

427

The first "mystery airship" was seen in November 1896 in the sky over
California. During the next five months thousands of people told of having
also observed dirigible-shaped craft beneath which some sort of illuminated
passenger carriage seemed suspended. Witnesses also reported some of these
strange craft carried colored or white lights; others were equipped with red
or white searchlights. However, among the numerous mystery airship sight-
ings reported over both urban and rural areas of this country's West and
Midwest between November 1896 and May 1897, one that took place on the
night of April 19, 1897, in Leroy, Kansas — given contemporary accounts of
animal mutilations — is of particular note. That night Alexander Hamilton,
a former congressman turned farmer, was awakened by sounds of distur-
bance among his cattle. He quickly dressed, went outside, and "to my utter
astonishment," he subsequently reported, he observed "an airship descend-
ing over my cow lot."

Hamilton rushed back inside to awake his son and his hired man. The
men hurriedly picked up axes and raced outside. Hamilton estimated that
the "airship" was approximately three hundred feet long. As they watched,
the craft descended until it was no more than thirty feet off the ground. Be-
neath the cigar-shaped airship's main structure the three men could clearly
see "a carriage . . . made of glass or some other transparent substance."

"It was brightly lit within," Hamilton noted, "and everything was plainly
visible." He then added that the glasslike undercarriage "was occupied by six
of the strangest beings I ever saw. They were jabbering together but we could
not understand a word they said. . . . Some noise attracted their attention,"
Hamilton continued, "and they turned a light directly on us."

Hamilton, his son, and the hired man next heard a buzzing sound like
that of "a great turbine wheel," and the huge aerial device began to rise
"lightly as a bird." The craft then stopped and hovered over one of Hamil-
ton's heifers. The calf appeared caught in the cow-lot fence. When Hamil-
ton went to rescue the young animal, he discovered the calf was tied to a
cable that stretched from the airship. At that moment, the aerial craft,
"heifer and all," Hamilton reported, "rose slowly, disappearing to the
northwest."

The next day, a neighbor familiar with Hamilton's cattle brand brought
him all that remained of the calf: its head, hide, and legs.

"I don't know whether they are angels or devils or what," Hamilton re-
marked, "but we all saw them . . . and," he added, "I don't want anything
more to do with them."

An affidavit accompanying the news account of Alexander Hamilton's
experience with the mystery airship was signed by eleven "prominent citi-
zens," each of whom had known Hamilton for between fifteen and thirty

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CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

years and was willing to attest to his confidence and belief in his statement
being "true and correct." 28

The last mystery airship sighting of that series took place on the morn-
ing of April 30, 1897, when one of the phantom machines was observed
silently floating northeastward over Yonkers, New York, towards the At-
lantic Ocean.

Although by the end of the nineteenth century enough had been
learned about structures, streamlining, power plants, and control devices to
construct powered balloons or airships that could be flown successfully, it
was not until October 19, 1901, three years after the last mystery airship
sighting, that a pilot of an airship or dirigible was capable of navigating a
simple seven-mile round-trip course within thirty minutes.*

My point is that cross-country journeys of the sort suggested by the
many mystery airship sightings were still not feasible.

Strange sightings continued. During World War II veteran fighter and
bomber pilots and crews on both sides reported strange glowing balls of
light that would pursue their aircraft, play tag with them, even fly forma-
tion off their wingtips; Allied pilots referred to them as "foo-fighters."

Later, between 1946 and 1958, thousands of people in the Scandinavian
countries close to the Soviet Union observed "ghost rockets" streaking
through the sky, or hovering overhead and then shooting off in a different
direction.

"As with later flying saucer reports," Thompson points out, "the objects
anticipated feats of technology not yet possible, although not beyond the
range of imagination. This prompted some researchers to speculate that a vast
paraphysical metaphenomenon lay behind all human visionary experiences,
aimed at slowly and imperceptibly expanding human consciousness." 30

Among the most striking modern visionary experiences was the famous
"miracle at Fatima," which combined both aerial and religious phenomena.
Keith Thompson describes it as follows:

On May 13, 1917, three illiterate shepherd children, at work tending sheep
outside Fatima, Portugal, were surprised by a bright flash in a nearby pas-
ture called Cova de Ira, widely known as an old sacred place. Approach-

* This is the feat accomplished on that date by airship pioneer Alberto Santos-Dumont,
when he piloted his balloon from the Aero Club at Saint-Cloud outside Paris around the
Eiffel Tower and back within thirty minutes, thereby winning the prestigious Deutsch Prize.

Santos-Dumont, heir to a Brazilian coffee fortune, was celebrated for his flights about
Paris in the early 1900s. "It was not uncommon to see his airship," writes historian John
Toland, "sail down the Rue Washington and hover over his ornate apartment until a butler,
standing on the steps, would haul him down." 29

Various Theories

ing the pasture, they were caught in a luminosity that nearly blinded
them. In the center of the blaze of light, they perceived a little woman who
told them she was "from Heaven" and warned that worldwide suffering
could be averted only if people [ceased] "offending God." The illuminated
figure — who quickly became known as Our Lady — asked them to return
to the same spot every month.

On June 13, the children returned. This time fifty witnesses watched
as the three knelt in prayer and the oldest, ten-year-old Lucia, addressed
an unseen entity whose answers were unheard by anyone other than Lucia
and her two young companions. One witness reported hearing a faint
voice or beelike buzzing. At the end of the dialogue, witnesses heard an
explosion and saw a small cloud rise near a tree.

Forty-five hundred witnesses joined the three children near the same
tree in the same pasture on July 13. This day several witnesses reported "a
buzzing or humming sound, a decrease in the sun's glow and heat, a small
whitish cloud about the tree of the apparitions, and a loud noise at the
Lady's departure," writes Joseph Pelletier in his book The Sun Danced at
Fdtima.

On August 13, the crowd grew to 18,000, but the three children were
not among them. They had been jailed by local officials eager to "put an
end to this nonsense." Even so, those present in the field reported a clap
of thunder followed by a bright flash and a cloud surrounding the same
"magical" tree. One month later a crowd of 30,000 watched in astonish-
ment as a globe of light appeared in plain view, advancing through the val-
ley floor from east to west, coming to rest on the same tree.

Two deeply skeptical priests — who arrived expecting to find evidence
only of contagious hysteria — reported that a white cloud formed around
the tree as "falling flowers" descended from the sky and disappeared as
witnesses reached to touch them.

The most amazing display occurred in Fatima on October 13, when
70,000 gathered in the pouring rain. Many came to keep faith with the
prophecy of Our Lady, others to taunt what they saw as a display of vile
medieval supernaturalism. Shortly after noon, thick gray clouds suddenly
parted and rolled back like curtains of a stage, as a strange sweet fragrance
filled the air. The sun appeared against the clear blue sky as a flat silver disc
revolving on its own axis and sent forth shafts of red, violet, yellow and
blue light in all directions. Suddenly the disc plunged erratically down-
ward in zigzag fashion, causing thousands of witnesses — believers and dis-
believers alike — to fall to their knees in public confession of their sins
before the world ended.

The disc stopped short and began slowly rising into the sky in the
same irregular way, disappearing into the sun, which stood once again
fixed in its natural brilliance. The entire display lasted less than fifteen
minutes. No less amazing was this fact, confirmed by the managing edi-

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CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

tor of Lisbon's largest daily newspaper: the streets and clothes of thou-
sands of witnesses were no longer wet, even though heavy rains had fallen
within the hour." Throughout the countryside, strange healings were re-
ported. 31

Thirteen years of scrupulous investigation later, the Catholic Church
offered this evaluation of the Fitima sighting: "This phenomenon, which
no astronomical observatory registered and which therefore was not natural,
was witnessed by persons of all categories and of all social classes, believers
and unbelievers, journalists of the principal Portuguese newspapers and
even by persons some miles away. Facts which annul any explanation of col-
lective illusion." 32

What the 70,000* Fitima witnesses and the Catholic Church saw as a
miracle Jacques Vallee sees as just one more aspect of the UFO phenome-
non: "The final miracle had come at the culmination of a precise series of
apparitions combined with contacts and messages that place it very clearly,
in my opinion, in the perspective of the UFO phenomenon. Not only was
a flying disc or globe consistently involved, but its motion, its falling-leaf
trajectory, its light effects, the thunderclaps, the buzzing sounds, the strange
fragrance, the fall of 'angel hair' [the flowerlike petals] that dissolves upon
reaching the ground, the heat wave associated with the close approach of the
disc — all of these are frequent parameters of UFO sightings everywhere.
And so are the paralysis, the amnesia, the conversion, and the healings." 34

Vallee's scholarship and research, like Keith Thompson's, are so evident
that anyone trying to see in the UFO phenomenon something less one-
dimensional than the argument "Are they real?" ends up reading and quot-
ing him. John Mack, for example, who calls Vallee "perhaps the most
comprehensive cross-cultural ufology investigator," devotes several pages in
his Abduction to Vallee's discussion of the international history of UFO en-
counters, his description of "hundreds of sightings of strange sky-born ob-
jects and their occupants across time, continents and societies," and Vallee's
citing of "the seemingly unexplainable presence of discs in the symbology of
various civilizations — the Phoenicians and early Christians, for instance, as-
sociated them with communications between angels and God." 35

Vallee also focuses upon the multitude of historic similarities worldwide
among those creatures Mack refers to as "nonhuman, shape-shifting, aeri-

* The record for the largest number of witnesses to a single sighting of an unexplained
aerial phenomenon is held by China, where one million persons in 1981 simultaneously saw
a spiral-shaped UFO. 33

Various Theories

43 1

ally adept beings" with "extraordinary powers" who have frequently ap-
peared before humans in "thousands of different guises ... to partake of
and/or take away something belonging to humans, desiring to communi-
cate with or simply play tricks on them." 36

Eddie Bui lard at the M.I.T. Conference addressed the parallels between
the fairies of folklore and the Small Grays of UFOs. But the point of this,
as Vallee explained, is not just that the "same power attributed to saucer
people was once the exclusive property of fairies," but that "the UFO occu-
pants, like the elves of old, are not extraterrestrials. They are denizens of an-
other reality." 37

Vallee muses whether "an advanced race somewhere in the universe and
sometime in the future has been showing us three-dimensional space operas
for the last two thousand years, in an attempt to guide our civilization. If
so," he asks, "do they deserve our congratulations?" And he wonders:

If they are not an advanced race from the future, are we dealing instead
with a parallel universe, another dimension where there are other human
races living, and where we may go at our expense, never to return to the
present? Are these races only semihuman, so that in order to maintain
contact with us, they need cross-breeding with men and women of our
planet? Is this the origin of the many tales and legends where genetics
plays a great role: the symbolism of the Virgin in occultism and religion,
the fairy tales involving human midwives and changelings, the sexual
overtones of the flying saucer reports, the biblical stories of intermarriage
between the Lord's angels and terrestrial women, whose offspring were gi-
ants? From that mysterious universe, are higher beings projecting objects
that can materialize and dematerialize at will? Are the UFOs "windows"
rather than "objects"?

There is nothing to support these assumptions, and yet, in view of the
historical continuity of the phenomenon, alternatives are hard to find, un-
less we deny the reality of all the facts, as our peace of mind would indeed
prefer. 38

Mack proposes that even if we allow "for the time being that there is lit-
tle knowledge about the domain from which the alien beings derive — per-
haps not even language or concepts to describe it," we should grant "that
something is going on that cannot be dismissed out of hand." 39

If we do accept that, Mack maintains, we are then forced to acknowl-
edge that "we are living in a vastly different universe from that which I, for
one, was taught about at home and in school." In that more familiar uni-
verse, he points out, "the various spirit entities, God or Gods and other
mythic beings that peoples throughout the world, including in our own cul-

432

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

cure, experience as altogether real have no objective reality. They are the sub-
ject matter of psychology and psychopathology, anthropology, religious
study, and science fiction, the projection outward of the perceptions and
images of the brain. If we make these entities real, it is through metaphor
and symbol, as poets do so well."

But, Mack insists, "to acknowledge that the universe (or universes) con-
tains other beings that have been able to enter our world and affect us as
powerfully as the alien entities seem able to do would require an expansion
of our notions of reality that all too radically undermine the Western scien-
tific and philosophical ideology which Tulane philosopher Michael Zim-
merman calls 'naturalistic humanism.' " 40

This Western scientific and philosophical ideology, philosopher
Richard Tarnas writes, is one whose "governing assumption" is that "any
meaning the human mind perceives in the universe does not exist intrinsi-
cally in the universe but is projected on it by the human mind." The con-
sequence of "this complete voiding of the cosmos, this absolute privileging
of the human" is, Tarnas continues, the "ultimate anthropocentric projec-
tion, the most subtle yet prodigious form of human self-aggrandizement,"
indicative, he feels, of an intellectual "hubris of cosmic proportion." 41

Paradoxically, as one moves deeper and deeper into the UFO phenom-
enon, one feels the need to move farther and farther away from the
true/false debates believers and skeptics become enmeshed in. This is be-
cause such arguments deteriorate into discussions about what defines "real."
Keith Thompson understandably shares this impatience: "Over the years,"
he reports, "nothing about the respective claims of UFO disciples and UFO
debunkers has convinced me of the need to reach definitive conclusions
about the ultimate nature and origins of this phenomenon.

"Instead," he continues, "I have watched with fascination as a persistent
body of remarkable stories (or in UFO jargon, 'sighting reports') has given
rise to provocative mythic horizons and imaginal realms."

Thompson contends that "these symbolic worlds are real, vital, and
filled with significance whether or not" he argues, "any particular UFO was
the planet Venus or a Venusian starship." 42

John Mack's impatience, too, lurks just beneath the surface in his insis-
tence that the physical reality of UFOs is not the important issue. "I am
often asked why, if UFOs and abductions are real, the spaceships do not
show up in more obvious form," he complains in Abduction. " 'Why don't
they land on the White House lawn?' is the reigning cliche. The most pop-
ular answer to this question among those who take the phenomenon seri-
ously is that the aliens do not dare to manifest themselves more directly.

Various Theories

433

Government leaders would panic, might attack them, and surely would not
know how to avoid scaring the rest of us.

"I believe," Mack continues, a little less testily,

that there is a better answer to this question. . . . The intelligence that ap-
pears to be at work here simply does not operate that way. It is subtler, and
its method is to invite, to remind, to permeate our culture from the bot-
tom up as well as the top down, and to open our consciousness in a way
that avoids a conclusion that is different from the ways we traditionally re-
quire. It is an intelligence that provides enough evidence that something
profoundly important is at work, but it does not offer the kinds of proof
that would satisfy an exclusively empirical, rationalist way of knowing. It
is for us to embrace the reality of the phenomenon and to take a step for-
ward appreciating that we live in a universe different from the one in
which we have been taught to believe. 43

In his short book Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Sky,
published in 1959, Carl Jung wrote, "Something is seen, but one doesn't
know what. It is difficult, if not impossible, to form any correct idea of these
objects because they behave not like bodies but like weightless thoughts." 44
The eminent Swiss psychiatrist-philosopher, then eighty-four years old,
wondered whether UFOs might not be "materialized psychisms" — actual
physical or paraphysical objects created by the collective unconscious.

In February 1951 Jung wrote a friend of his inability to determine
whether UFOs should be considered rumors related to mass hallucinations
or actual facts. Jung explained that he found both options interesting,
adding: "If it's a rumour, then the apparition of discs must be a symbol pro-
duced by the unconscious. We know what such a thing would mean seen
from the psychological standpoint. If on the other hand it is a hard and con-
crete fact, we are surely confronted with something out of the way. . . . The
phenomenon of the saucers might even be both, rumour as well as
fact. . . . It's just too bad that we don't know enough about it." 45

Jung did not mean "rumors" in the sense of uncorroborated hearsay; he
meant them, Thompson explains, rather as " 'visionary rumors' of the same
order as religious visions. Such visions are experienced in times of personal
and collective distress or danger, or in response to 'vital psychic need,' Jung
noted. Perhaps the collective unconscious was sending forth such visions,
just as individuals experienced abnormal convictions, visions, and illusions
at times of dissociation between conscious and unconscious attitudes.

"With a certain somberness," Thompson continues, "Jung noted that
he was not pleased to conclude that the appearance of UFOs clearly indi-

434

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

cated 'coming events which are in accord with the end of an era.' Such
large-scale anomalies typically arise when wholesale changes are under way
in the balance of forces in the collective unconscious — that vast repository
of images and motifs common to the myths and dreams of peoples
throughout the world, all connected as a complex matrix transcending time
and space. Jung had no doubt that humanity was entering a time of pro-
found transition. . . .

"The frequently reported round shape of the objects suggested to Jung
the mandala" Thompson points out, "a recurring image of psychic totality
found in mythologies throughout the world, with names such as the 'sun
wheel' or 'magic circle.' UFOs might represent a mythological concept of
the soul, which was said in ancient times to assume the form of a sphere.
Jung found it interesting that an image expressing order, wholeness, and sal-
vation should 'now take the form of an object, a technological construc-
tion,' to bypass the disadvantages of mythological associations in an age
where magic had been supplanted by machines." 46

The obsolescence of mythological symbols as questionable transmitters
of psychic messages aside, the appearance of UFOs as "materialized psy-
chisms" was what really interested Jung — which is not surprising. It was
Jung's contention that there exists a collective unconscious within which —
or out of which — certain basic, original primordial patterns or images
emerge that are shared by all mankind. The basis for these universal patterns
or images Jung called "archetypes."

Jung, Thompson explains, "originally conceived of archetypes as the
deepest patterns of psychic functioning, the root patterns of instinctive be-
havior. He came to see archetypes as the immaterial potentials inherent in
structures, as fundamental to the existence of all living organisms. Even-
tually," Thompson notes, "the archetypes became in [Jung's] own words,
'the bridge to matter in general.' " 47

It is the questioning of this relationship between mind and matter
around which much of the current thinking about UFOs revolves. Philoso-
phers, physicists, psychologists, neurologists, neurosurgeons, biochemists,
researchers, scholars, folklorists, abductees, and journalists alike circle this
issue like dogs circling a spot on the rug, searching for a warm and com-
fortable place where they might set their intellects down.

"The ultimate mystery facing us is how matter becomes conscious," writes
theoretical physicist Fred Alan Wolf. "Simply put, we argue that we are
made of matter, then how does that matter seemingly produce or create im-
ages and thoughts? Or even put more crudely, how does meat dream?" 48

Various Theories

435

Jung hypothesized that there existed a realm of being between the phys-
ical and the psychical, what Wolf calls the "third reality," located "between
the earthly mundane and the completely abstract world of concepts." 49
Others — among them Islamic scholar Henri Corbin, psychologist Kenneth
Ring, folklorist Peter Rojcewicz, and physicist Werner Heisenberg — have
referred to this third reality as the "Middle Realm" or "Imaginal Realm."

"The Imaginal Realm is real," Wolf asserts, "but not physical, and as
such it is not unlike Jung's notion of the psychoid archetype and a related
alchemical idea he calls the unus mundus (one world). It is a place where psy-
che and nature manifest with a dual aspect not resolving itself into either of
its two aspects." 50 Rojcewicz, professor ofhumanities at New York's Juilliard
School, explains this concept as follows:

The psychoid nature of the unus mundus is a blurred-reality genre. The
psychoid realm raises questions of perceptions and epistemology. In our
materialist tradition we are trained to develop a monocular vision and see
only the physical. If we happen to see a blurred-reality genre, that is,
something in an ambiguous ontological state, most of us would likely see
only the most conspicuous physical aspect of it. Some of us would fail to
see anything at all. As far as we know about the process of perception, the
brain intercedes from moment to moment, matching up and synthesizing
what is occurring out there with what it has already recorded. Psychoid
phenomena raise the question of whether or not an event takes place in an
intermediate realm which doesn't manifest exclusively in a physical objec-
tive way or leave a trace. 51

"Psychoid events," Wolf speculates, "are occurring in a realm of reality that
does not fit into material physics. Yet, psychoid events have both a partial
and temporary physical manifestation." 52

Michael Grosso, an artist/philosopher/college professor well known
for his UFO research, hypothesizes, according to Wolf, "that UFOs and
other extraordinary phenomena are actually manifestations of a distur-
bance in the collective unconscious of the human species . . . caused by the
violent impact of modern science on human life and the ecology of the
earth." 53 Henry H. Price, professor of logic at Oxford and former president
of Britain's Society for Psychical Research, expressed the opinion that every
"idea" is inherently psychokinetic: in other words, it has the potential to
materialize itself in some form. Grosso suggests that if our ideas are shared
telepathically — even though we might be unaware we are sharing them —
we would be creating group thought processes which might have increased
psychokinetic potential. "This would imply," Wolf explains, "that a myth
such as the UFO that was understood in a fictional sense might objectify

436

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

itself temporarily under certain circumstances in space and time and as-
sume certain commonly physical characteristics." This concept "could
have some basis in the quantum physical idea of observer-created reality,"
Wolf thinks. "If more than one observer is involved some form of amplifi-
cation may occur wherein several people have the same or similar images
of an event." 54

Grosso makes the point that we in the Western world are haunted by
our desire for a gentler age, but that because of the plethora of televised and
still pictures of abused, starving children, our unconscious minds are filled
with such images. The visual reports of the aliens, Grosso notes, are of sim-
ilar life forms: fetal-like Beings often resembling the starving children with
sticklike arms, large heads, and bulging eyes one views in nations where
drought and famine and war have decimated the land. "Could this explain
the persistence and the similarity of the images of aliens as they appear to
us?" Wolf asks. "Are we witnessing something akin to a . . . survival dream
of the human species that manifests in some of us?" 55

In someof us, but not all of us.

"Studies show that we often do not see something unless we truly believe
in it," Wolf writes. "Michael Grosso finds this interesting from a neurologi-
cal viewpoint; there may, however, be some percipients who encounter
UFOs simply because they possess a wider range of the visual field and have
different thresholds."

Psychologist Kenneth Ring in The Omega Project: Near-Death Experi-
ences, UFO Encounters, and Mind at Large (1992), suggested that people who
have UFO (or Near-Death) experiences might be "encounter prone" and
that because of unusual experiences in their past, they might be more open
to such experiences in the future. "He in no way suggested that these indi-
viduals are less capable of coping with reality," Wolf emphasizes, "on the
contrary, that they are distinctive, spiritually sensitive, and possess visionary
psyches that may be signals of an evolutionary trend — a new stage of early
development." This new trend might be, Wolf continues, "the recognition
that mind is not confined to individual and separated persons, but is uni-
versal, singular, and beyond any conceptual limit we enforce, such as the no-
tion of space-time confinement. Thus I am suggesting that Near-Death
Experiences (NDEs), UFO encounters, and a range of other imaginal realm
(IR) bleed-throughs into our normally seemingly separated minds are an
evolutionary trend leading us to a single one-mind experience of our SELF,
the whole universe and nothing else." 56

British biochemist Rupert Sheldrake has proposed that when a new or-
ganic chemical is crystallized, "on the first occasion it may not crystalize at
all easily; but on subsequent occasions crystallization should occur more

Various Theories

437

and more easily as increasing numbers of past crystals contribute to its mor-
phic field by 'morphic resonance.' " 57 Sheldrake reports this has been borne
out in practice and hypothesizes that what this experiment suggests is the
existence of an unconscious collective cumulative memory accessible to all
nature. According to Sheldrake, individuals who do the London Times
crossword puzzle at night, for example, do it more quickly than those who
work it in the morning because through morphic resonance the answers
have already entered the collective unconscious. If so, this might account for
the similarity in abduction accounts.

UFO experiences are from the Imaginal Realm, Wolf speculates, and
therefore have a different but "real" feeling to them as compared to ordinary
experiences. "They are not the same as so-called solid-reality experiences
that we commonly experience in everyday life," he explains, then adds: "I
am also not saying they are fantasies or hallucinations." Wolf suggests a con-
nection exists between Imaginal Realm experiences and certain experiences
occurring both physiologically and psychologically in the dreaming brain.
"The first piece of evidence that leads to this evolutionary conclusion,"
Wolf reports, "is one of the points Ring makes: the discontinuous character
of UFO encounters and NDEs resembles that of similar phenomena in
dreams." 58 Unquestionably there was a discontinuous character to Carol's
and Alice's encounter narratives. They were — as Thompson remarked about
UFO encounter events in general "typically surrealistic — dreamlike, fantas-
tical, at once less and more than real." 59 Their narratives were interrupted
by quick cuts: "Suddenly I was inside . . ." or "The next thing I knew . . ."
or "I don't remember how I . . ." — the sort of rapid scene shifts common to
our own dreams.

Ring emphasizes that it is important not to confuse the description of
the experience with the experience itself. In other words, a person describ-
ing a UFO encounter will automatically impose upon that experience a lin-
ear, time-ordered sequence in an attempt to make sense of it. However, as
Ring also makes clear, he is not saying UFO encounters are dreams as such;
he is saying they are like dreams; similar, Ring states, to "dreams that one
has awakened into and that, in some unknown way have come to interpen-
etrate ordinary reality, resulting in a kind of double vision, which, eventu-
ally, returns to normal. If these experiences are some [form] of dream [they]
must be some sort of collective dream since many people are reporting sim-
ilar, and similarly bizarre, encounters." 60

Fred Alan Wolf also reports the interesting connection discovered by
UFO researchers Paul Devereux and Michael Persinger between electrical
activity in the brain and both NDEs and CE-IV experiences: "Devereux has
found that people usually report observing unusual light phenomena,"

438

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

Wolf writes, near fault lines, power lines, transmitter towers, mountain
peaks, isolated buildings, road and railway lines, and bodies of water in-
cluding waterfalls. In many instances these lights seem to emerge from the
ground and either swiftly dissolve or hover, sometimes touching down to
the ground again and then rising several thousands of feet in the air. They
have also been seen during daylight hours and appear metallic. Light phe-
nomena also tend to reappear in certain regions of the world so often that
local people have incorporated them into folklore and superstitions. Dev-
ereux believes that such light phenomena are characteristic of high-amplitude
electromagnetic disturbances. 61

UFO researcher Devereux and Michael Persinger, who is both a pro-
fessor of psychology and a clinical neurophysiologist, believe, according
to Wolf, that "UFO phenomena are natural occurrences producing high-
amplitude electromagnetic pulses that are direct products of stress relief in
tectonic plate movements of the earth's crust. Persinger's statistical studies
show that seismic events are clearly related to UFO reports. In other
words, during seismic events more UFO sightings will be reported." 62

Let's, for a moment, say this is true. If Devereux and Persinger are cor-
rect, then, Wolf suggests, if a person is at the right distance — not too near
and not too far — from a tectonic stress release and its resulting burst of elec-
tromagnetic energy, that person might see light phenomena typical of those
reported during Close Encounters of the First and Second Kinds. And if,
Wolf continues, the person "approaches the light or if he happens to be
standing near enough to it, he may be close enough to the electromagnetic
energy burst (EMEB) to feel its effects. These could include the raising of
hair on the body and head, skin tingling, goose bumps, and other signs of
nervous excitation. Following this line, deeper immersions could lead to
brain disturbances resulting in psychological disturbances and hallucinatory

"63

images.

This is not as farfetched as it might at first seem. The temporal lobe of
the brain is particularly sensitive to electrical disturbances. Probably the
most research bearing this out was done by the late neurosurgeon Wilder
Penfield, who, Wolf reports, observed that "the temporal lobe has convolu-
tions that are apparently new evolutionarily and are not committed to
motor or sensory function. . . . During the initial learning stages of child-
hood some of these convolutions seem to be devoted to interpretation of
present experience in terms of past experience. This part of the temporal
lobe has today been labeled the interpretive cortex.

"During surgical procedures on patients suffering from temporal-lobe
seizures (epileptic seizures caused by electrical discharges originating in the
temporal lobe)," Wolf explains, "Penfield and his colleagues stumbled upon

Various Theories

439

the fact that electrical stimulation of the interpretive areas of the cortex oc-
casionally produced . . . 'dream states' or 'psychical seizures'. ... It was clear
to Penfield that these 'dream states' were not dreams. They were electrical ac-
tivations of sequences of records laid down during the patient's earlier con-
scious experiences. The patient 'relived' all that he had been aware of during
an earlier period of time. He was having a moving-picture 'flashback.' " M

In Penfield's paper The Mystery of the Mind: A Critical Study of Con-
sciousness and the Human Brain (1975), the neurosurgeon described how
vivid some of these "flashbacks" could be. Through the electrical stimula-
tion of certain specific areas of a patient's temporal cortex, the subject might
relive the whole range of human sensory experiences — tastes, smells, emo-
tions, physical responses, and especially visual and auditory details — as
though they were happening to the individual all over again. For example,
one young male patient, Penfield noted, reported being at a small-town
baseball field watching a child sneak under the fence to get in to see the
game. Another patient relived the experience of being in a concert hall and
being able to hear the contributions each of the different instruments made
to the music.

Princeton psychologist Julian Jaynes disagrees that the basis for these
flashbacks is past experiences. "These areas [of the patient's temporal cor-
tex]," Jaynes writes, "are not the 'brain's record of auditory and visual expe-
rience,' nor are they its retrieval, but combinations and amalgamations of
certain aspects of that experience. The evidence does not, I think, warrant
the assertion that these areas 'play in adult lives some role in the subcon-
scious recall of past experience, making it available for present interpreta-
tion.' Rather the data lead away from this, to hallucinations that distill
particularly admonition experiences, and perhaps become embodied or ra-
tionalized into actual experiences in those patients who reported them on
being questioned." 65

Jaynes speculates that until late in the second millennium B.C. human
consciousness did not exist; instead, early humans walked around in some-
thing like a "dream state" of trance unconsciousness, automatically obeying
what they took to be the voices of gods. What was this state like? "Some of
the fundamental, most characteristic, and most common symptoms of
florid unmedicated schizophrenia," Jaynes writes, "are uniquely consistent
with the description I have given ... of the bicameral mind." 66 Conscious-
ness, Jaynes suggests, was only learned three thousand years ago, distilled
out of a cauldron of cataclysms and catastrophes partially created by this
earlier hallucinatory mentality. (It is interesting to note that not until the
end of the sixteenth century was madness considered a symptom of a mal-
functioning brain rather than of having been "touched" by the gods.)

440

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

Michael Persinger reports in the Journal of Near-Death Studies that all
of the major components of the near-death experience (including looking
down at one's own body, flying, hearing hauntingly beautiful music, being
drawn to a brilliant light, and a profound sense of meaning) can now be du-
plicated upon a patient in a laboratory by introducing a minimal amount
of electrical current induction to his temporal lobe.

"Based on the above findings," Wolf concludes, "there seems to be no
doubt that imaginal-realm experiences are produced by electrical distur-
bances in the temporal lobe. These can be induced by anomalous electro-
magnetic phenomena, such as those that accompany tectonic stress relief in
the earth's crust and brain surgical procedures, and even under laboratory
settings. But," he then asks, "what about you and me? What about so-called
normal people who, through seemingly no fault of their own, experience
such phenomena when no added electrical stimulation is present?" 67

Persinger, Wolf reports, seems to agree with Kenneth Ring: some indi-
viduals may be "encounter prone." For whatever the reason or reasons, Wolf
writes, these individuals may be "unusually sensitive to normal temporal-
lobe electrical activity." 68

Ring did a study of people who had had NDEs or some kind of UFO
experience and, as a control group, people who had not but were inter-
ested in them. He discovered that the NDEers and UFOers were not more
fantasy-prone — a finding borne out by researchers' reports at the M.I.T.
conference. They were, however, more susceptible to alternate realities —
and had been so since childhood.

Why would a child be more sensitive to alternate realities than to fan-
tasies? What did these individuals, as children, have in common, Wolf asks,
that would make them more prone to these kinds of experiences? "The an-
swer," he tells us, "is disturbing and illuminating. There appears to be a high
correlation between child abuse and imaginal realm sensitivity." And here
Wolf again quotes psychologist Ring: "These children come," Ring reports,
"not from the ranks of the fantasy-prone, but with histories of child abuse
that include sexual and psychological trauma, neglect, and family dysfunc-
tionality." 69

Dave Jacobs disagrees. "What is astonishing, what is incredible," Jacobs
told me, "is that although virtually all therapists immediately think that the
abduction phenomenon is a screen memory for sexual abuse, they have
never been able to produce one single case of this. They have not put for-
ward even one case which unequivocally shows that abduction fantasies are
caused by repressed memories of sexual abuse. If there is such a case, I want
to see it. I want to see how it works and what its dynamics are."

Various Theories

44 1

John Mack disagrees, too. While acknowledging the associations made
between sexual abuse and abductions, Mack expresses his belief that "errors
related to the misremembering of traumatic experiences, or the reverse —
traumatic experiences of one kind (abduction) opening the psyche to the
recollection of traumas of another kind (sexual abuse) — can lead to falsely
overstressing the association. I have worked with one woman, for exam-
ple," Mack continues, "who went to a capable psychotherapist for pre-
sumed sexual abuse and incest-related problems. Several hypnosis sessions
failed to reveal evidence of such events. But during one of her sessions she
recalled a UFO that landed near her home when she was a six-year-old girl
from which emerged typical alien beings who took her aboard the craft.
For the first time, she experienced powerful emotions, especially fear, in
the therapy hour. The therapist who referred the woman to me told me
that he was 'clean,' i.e., was not directly familiar with the abduction phe-
nomenon and did not suspect that she had such a history. There is not a
single abduction case in my experience or that of other investigators that
has turned out to have masked a history of sexual abuse or any other trau-
matic cause. But," Mack stresses, "the reverse has frequently occurred —
that an abduction history has been revealed in cases investigated for sexual
or other traumatic abuse." 70

Sexual abuse in her case was a screen memory for an abduction.

But the role child abuse plays in susceptibility to alternate realities can't
easily be resolved. Abused children tend to dissociate. "A family history of
child abuse and trauma promotes dissociative response as a psychological
defense," Wolf notes. "If you grew up in a home of unpredictable violence
or sexual abuse or other forms of trauma, you would be motivated to tune
out of the situation." 71 As Kenneth Ring explains, "They can do anything
to your body but you, the 'real' you inside, will go elsewhere. Once you
learn to dissociate in response to the trauma, you are much more likely to
become sensitive to alternate realities." 72

Michael Persinger suggests that physical abuse may physically affect the
brain in such a way that it becomes more sensitive to alternate realities. Per-
haps this is what "encounter-prone" people are: people who, because they
were abused as children, have brains responsive to stimuli others do not.

"To a frog with its simple eye, the world is a dim array of greys and
blacks," Michael Murphy notes in The Future of the Body. And perhaps he
is right to ask, "Are we like frogs in our limited sensorium, apprehending
just part of the universe we inhabit? Are we as a species now awakening to
the reality of multidimensional worlds in which matter undergoes subtle re-
organizations in some sort of hyperspace? Is visionary experience analogous

442

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

to the first breathings of early amphibians? Are we ourselves coming ashore
to a 'larger earth'?" 73

"I am struck by Murphy's analogy between the limited vision of the frog
and the human being," Keith Thompson writes. "The visual apparatus of a
frog, consisting of a mere handful of nerve cells, is rudimentary indeed
when compared, say, with the structure of the human eye. The frog sees lit-
tle more than indistinct shapes and forms, limited (as Murphy notes) to a
gray-black hue. This is not to say the frog sees 'incorrectly,' " Thompson
adds, "but rather the frog sees what it can see according to its structure
[Thompson's italics], which is adequate for snaring insects with its tongue
and — much of the time — eluding predators. We humans know there is
'more' to see, but the frog does not — at least so far as we can tell."

Thompson then speculates: "It is conceivable that we perceive UFOs
and other 'anomalous' phenomena according to our predominant yet still-
evolving psychospiritual 'structure.' Just as the frog is 'embedded' within a
world of forms that it does not apprehend fully . . . what we humans term
'reality' may in fact be a limited spectrum of a much larger realm of possi-
bilities, where what we call 'mind' and 'matter' have not yet distilled into the
few dimensions that we can 'capture.''

"Ours may well be a 'world within worlds,' " Thompson muses. "In
Michael Murphy's phrase, this earth may be embedded in a 'larger earth.' " 74

Where does this leave us?

David Jacobs warns, "We must realize that the abduction phenomenon is too
important to dismiss as the ravings of prevaricators or psychologically dis-
turbed people. I hope the extraordinary lack of scientific concern to date does
not in the long run prove to be a mistake with undreamed-of consequences." 75

Budd Hopkins insists: "UFO abduction reports, because of their simi-
larity of content and detail, must be accepted one of two ways: Either they
represent some new and heretofore unrecognized and nearly universal psy-
chological phenomenon — a theory which does not take into account the
accompanying physical evidence — or they represent honest attempts to re-
port real events." 76

John Mack tells us that "no familiar theory or explanation has even
come close to accounting for the basic features of the abduction phenome-
non. In short, it is what it is, though its ultimate source remains a mystery."

Keith Thompson suggests it is "a prod to our next level of consciousness."

Whitley Strieber reports, "We may very well be something different
from what we believe ourselves to be, on this earth for reasons that may not
yet be known to us."

Various Theories

443

Carl Jung wrote that UFOs behaved "like weightless thoughts" and
wondered whether they might be "materialized psychisms."

Michael Grosso thinks UFOs might be "manifestations of a disturbance
in the collective unconscious caused by the impact of modern science on
human life and the ecology of the earth," and that the strange physical char-
acteristics of the Small Grays reflect our collective fear over what is happen-
ing to this planet's children.

Jacques Vallee asks whether UFOs are "windows" rather than "objects,"
then tells us the "UFO occupants are not extraterrestrials" but "denizens of
another reality."

Peter Rojcewicz explains that "psychoid phenomena raise the question of
whether or not an event takes place in an intermediate realm which doesn't
manifest exclusively in a physical objective way or leave a trace."

Kenneth Ring calls that intermediate realm the "Imaginal Realm."

Fred Alan Wolf suggests that because "psychoid events have both a par-
tial and temporal physical manifestation," they are "occurring in a realm of
reality that does not fit into material physics" but does, however, fit into
quantum physics, "which doesn't describe the realm of subjective experience
or the realm of objective experience," but rather "the realm of imaginal ex-
perience that is potential material experience." 77

John Mack says we must acknowledge that "the world might be other
than we have known it." Vallee wonders whether "an advanced race some-
where in the universe and sometime in the future" has been attempting "to
guide our civilization" and if not, asks, "Are we dealing instead with a par-
allel universe, another dimension where there are other human races liv-
ing?" Whitley Strieber says the "visitors" are responsible for the paranormal
phenomena.

Mack says the trauma caused by the phenomena is often mistakenly
blamed on child abuse. Kenneth Ring says child abuse is responsible for the
ability to perceive these phenomena; it has made such individuals more sus-
ceptible to alternate realities. He calls the experiencers "encounter prone"
and suggests such persons' visionary psyches may be the first signs of an evo-
lutionary stage in human development.

Wolf suggests that such "imaginal realm bleed-throughs into our nor-
mally seemingly separated minds are an evolutionary trend leading us to
a single one-mind experience of our SELF, the whole universe and noth-
ing else."

"The acknowledgement of [the alien beings'] existence, after the initial
ontological shock," Mack writes, "is sometimes the first step in the opening
of consciousness to a universe that is no longer simply material. Abductees
come to appreciate that the universe is filled with intelligences and is itself

444 CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

intelligent. They develop a sense of awe before a mysterious cosmos that be-
comes sacred and ensouled. The sense of separation becomes an essential as-
pect of the evolution of the abductees' consciousness." 78

Julian Jaynes reports, "From fossil evidence we know factually that the
brain, particularly the frontal lobe in front of the central sulcus, was in-
creasing with a rapidity that still astonishes the modern evolutionist." 79

Wilder Penfield discovered that electrical stimulation of the interpretive
area of the temporal lobe could produce "dream states" that were not
dreams but vivid "moving-picture 'flashbacks' " to earlier experiences.

Fred Alan Wolf states, "there seems to be no doubt that imaginal-realm
experiences are produced by electrical disturbances in the temporal lobe."

Michael Persinger reports that all of the major components of the Near-
Death Experience can be duplicated upon a patient in a lab and notes that
statistics show there will be more UFO sightings during seismic events.

When Vaclav Havel, president of the Czech Republic, received the Philadel-
phia Liberty Medal at Independence Hall on July 4, 1994, he referred to two
specimens of postmodern science, the "anthropic cosmological principle,"
first set out by English physicist Brandon Carter in 1974, and the "Gaia Hy-
pothesis,"* suggested by another Englishman, James Lovelock, two years
earlier, in 1972.

The anthropic cosmological principle, Havel explained, "brings us to
an idea, perhaps as old as humanity itself, that we are not at all just an acci-
dental anomaly, the microscopic caprice of a tiny particle whirling in the
endless depths of the universe. Instead, we are mysteriously connected to
the universe, we are mirrored in it, just as the entire evolution of the uni-
verse is mirrored in us."

According to the Gaia Hypothesis, Havel continued, "we are parts of a
greater whole. Our destiny is not dependent merely on what we do for our-
selves but also on what we do for Gaia as a whole. If we endanger her, she
will dispense with us, in the interests of a higher value — life itself."

Near the conclusion of his remarks Havel declared, "The only real hope
of people today is probably a renewal of our certainty that we are rooted in
the earth and, at the same time, the cosmos. This awareness endows us with
the capacity for self-transcendence. Politicians at international forums may
reiterate a thousand times that the basis of the new world order must be uni-
versal respect for human rights, but it will mean nothing as long as this im-

* "Gaia" is the Greek "Mother Earth."

Various Theories

445

perative does not derive from the respect of the miracle of Being, the mira-
cle of the universe, the miracle of our own existence." 80

Five weeks later, in response to Havel's speech, Nicholas Wade wrote in
The New York Times Magazine that the trouble with the anthropic cosmo-
logical principle "is that it is closer to metaphysics than to physics. It invites
you to think of a celestial clockmaker who designed the machinery and set
the parameters just right for life to evolve. But unless someone finds a ser-
ial number stamped on the universe, it offers no way of proving the clock-
maker's existence or seeking evidence of his purpose.

"Scientists have given the idea mixed reception," Wade continued,

The Princeton physicist Freeman Dyson has declared the principle "illu-
minating," his own take on it being that the universe is designed to make
life possible but not too easy. On this reading, presumably, the transcen-
dent value for humankind is simply to survive, for purposes to be revealed
at a later time. The cosmologist Joseph Silk, on the other hand, has
likened the anthropic principle to the satisfaction felt by a colony of fleas
in a dog's pelt that everything in their world had been ordained just right
for their existence, a theory that proved eminently tenable until the dog's
mistress got a flea collar.

The trouble with the Gaia Hypothesis, Wade went on, is that "the idea
quickly becomes mystical since it strongly implies a nice greenhouse with a
thermostat and a kindly gardener who set the system in motion." Wade's
skepticism is clear: "The anthropic principle and the Gaia hypothesis are
both elegant ideas," he wrote,

expressed in scientific language by scientists who share Havel's yearning
for a glimpse of transcendent purpose in the universe. But neither concept
is a part of practical science because the very transcendent element that so
attracts Havel also renders them untestable. Science is not revealed by in-
trospection; it is a system of inquiry rooted in the empirical. It requires its
theories to grow from established fact and to explain what is, not what
might be. 81

The dichotomy between What is and what might be is what powers the
UFO phenomenon. It is the mystery that has intrigued me and so many
others who remain on the outside; it is the conflict — if that is not too strong
a word — that arose at M.I.T. and was best embodied by the differing points
of view of its two chairmen.

In his closing remarks at the conference John Mack had asked us to look
at the phenomenon with a "kind of philosophical, spiritual perspective. You

446

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

all know the Vermont farmer that gave up trying to explain directions to the
city slicker by saying, 'You just can't get there from here.' Well, we can't get
there without a shift in our worldview."

Both at the conference and in our subsequent conversations Mack sug-
gested that the data accumulating on the abduction phenomenon was so
revolutionary that it was necessary for us to abandon our traditional scien-
tific methods and adopt some other approach. "We are very vested in the
materialist/dualist worldview," he had told us in his closing remarks.
"Those of us in the scientific, economic establishment hang on tight to our
familiar paradigm. Perhaps scientists hang on tighter than all the rest be-
cause our lives and work depend so much on an agreed upon set of as-
sumptions about the universe. But now, really, we can stop fussing over
whether we have got something real here. Instead, it may be time to expand
our consciousness and reach out to embrace the extraordinary breadth and
depth of power and meaning to the abduction phenomenon."

Pritchard disagrees. The phenomenon, he said in his closing remarks, is
"an incredible problem that begs for a careful and multidisciplinary investi-
gation. That has been the spirit of this conference, and that is the spirit that
we must communicate to others outside this community." By example —
such as his investigation into the Price "implant" — and by his words,
Pritchard was declaring his faith in the scientific method.

"Being an active researcher in physics, especially Quantum Mechanics,"
Pritchard recently wrote me, "reaffirms this faith in the scientific approach.
Philosophers could never convince a large majority (even of philosophers)
that time and length can transform into each other or that reality doesn't
exist until it is measured — but the scientific method has done this by find-
ing theories that make quantitative predictions of the degree to which these
things happen that agree with reproducible experiments. I don't think it is
sensible to try new epistemologies on any phenomenon until the old reli-
able scientific method has been carefully and assiduously applied and come
up empty — obviously not the case with abductions since this [was] the first
truly scientific conference on the subject." 82

In other words, Mack is to Pritchard as Havel is to Wade?

Several weeks after I had returned from attending Carol's and Alice's hyp-
nosis sessions in Budd Hopkins's studio in New York, I was sitting on the
back steps of my house looking up at the overcast late-afternoon sky. Sud-
denly, almost directly above me, I saw a flat, saucer-shaped object passing
overhead. The disc, silhouetted against the thick, dull-gray cloud cover, was
about the size of a dime held out at arm's length.

Various Theories

447

Because of the unbroken clouds and the failing light there was no way
to determine the disc's altitude or volume; and since it was moving slowly
and appeared to be following the prevailing wind patterns I assumed I was
looking at a child's balloon. But, as I continued to watch, the disc rotated
slightly and I saw the unmistakable metallic glint of its surface. And then as
it turned even more I saw that the object wasn't round like a balloon at all!
Two of its sides were distinctly flattened. I experienced a rush of excitement:
I was finally seeing a UFO! But then I felt a slight puff of wind and the ob-
ject soared upward.

What I was looking at, I realized, was one of those pillow-shaped, sil-
very, Mylar party balloons.

Prior to the Abduction Study Conference at M.I.T. it had never oc-
curred to me that I might see a UFO. More significant, perhaps, I had never
deliberately scanned the sky in search of one. Now, when I step outside at
night and see lights moving against the stars, a part of me hopes that they
will not always turn out to be airplanes.

If the conference, and my subsequent interviews and discussions with
its participants and investigators, failed to provide me with "clear and con-
vincing evidence" that these abductees experienced extraterrestrial visita-
tions, I did come away a believer in the sincerity and merit of their quest.
Like the abductees and their examiners, I am filled with wonder at their en-
counters. I envy them their experiences (some of them, anyway); I want
them to be true. I want to believe that beings from other worlds — if they
haven't visited us already — someday will.

I have come to admire Dave Pritchard, Budd Hopkins, and John Car-
penter; Dave Jacobs, John Miller, and D. C. Donderi; Mark Rodeghier,
Linda Moulton Howe, and all those other "presenters" and abductees at the
M.I.T. Abduction Study Conference — the ghost of J. Allen Hynek in-
cluded — to whom John Mack could also have been referring when he ac-
knowledged at the conference's opening the "heroic, courageous — I won't
quite say 'foolhardy,' but that was the word going through my head — work
of Dave Pritchard in all of this. He has put himself on the line." They all put
themselves on the line. They all were "taking a stand" and moving "science
and human thought along."

I can't bring myself to judge them "foolhardy" either; I admire them far
too much for that. I respect their conviction that the evidence is so com-
pelling they have no choice but to risk not being taken seriously.

I am beginning to sound like Eliot Rosewater, Kurt Vonnegut's fictional
multimillionaire, who crashes a science fiction writer's convention being held
in a Milford, Pennsylvania, motel and drunkenly enthuses to the startled as-
sembly, "I love you sons of bitches! . . . You're the only ones who'll talk about

448

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

the really terrific changes going on, the only ones crazy enough to know that
life is a space voyage, and not a short one either, but one that will last for bil-
lions of years. . . . You're the only ones zany enough to agonize over time and
distances without limit, over mysteries that will never die." 83

And yet what could be more important than the search for proof that
there might, in fact, really be terrific changes going on; that we might, in
fact, not be alone, that there might, in fact, exist something above and be-
yond the reality we can see?

Keith Thompson quotes the ancient Chinese aphorism "The fish is the
last one to know that it lives in water" and goes on to explain:

The fish takes for granted that the medium it knows is the True Ele-
ment — indeed, the only element. Why should it imagine otherwise? But
then, one day, a particular fish swims into a remote part of the lake and
sees a strange object above. The fish has no name for what it sees from
below, but we who are above would call the object a "bobber." Amazed,
the fish returns to its school and tells what it has seen. The story is im-
pressive, but the other fish are not so interested. After all, there is always
fresh kelp to find, not to mention larger, hungry fish to avoid. News of
such strange objects can only be a dangerous distraction to the overall af-
fairs of the school.

Over time, however, others see the bobber, and a robust set of legends
grows. Then, on a particular day, a fish happens to swim too close to the
object and gets "hooked." Suddenly this fish finds itself pulled «/>and out,
into a vast and altogether amazing realm of above and beyond. Those who
have snagged the fish and reeled it in, after analyzing the creature accord-
ing to particular criteria, decide the fish is not a "keeper" and toss it back
into the ocean. Bewildered, the fish makes it way back with an even more
incredible tale to tell about another world — a very different kind of
world — populated by the most marvelous of beings.

Depending on how this news is revealed and received, the fish is dei-
fied, eaten, or simply isolated from the rest of the school, where it is left
to muse aloud, "Water! We live and swim in water! I have just now seen
that which is not water: I have glimpsed 'dry land,' and 'open sky.' Does
anyone hear me? Does anyone care?" s *

I care. And I am beholden to those people I met in the course of this
book for having so richly populated the universe, our little "blue pond," and
my imagination with "the most marvelous of beings" — be they Small Grays,
Tall Grays, Nordic-types, reptilians, John Mack's aerially adept "Merry
Tricksters," or Carl Jung's "materialized psychisms."

And whereas it might be foolhardy to admit I would like to believe there
exist mutually unearthly creatures who might ask one Earthling woman to

Various Theories

449

"eat only cow things" and ask another permission to try on her high-heeled
shoes, I cannot honestly say I have come across any hard evidence of their
presence.

Still, until someone comes forward with proof that such beings don't
exist, I intend to continue keeping an eye out for their "bobbers" — and, yes,
an open mind.

Zar would like that.

C. D. B. Bryan
Guilford, Connecticut

Notes

BACKGROUND

1 Budd Hopkins, Intruders: The Incredible Visitation at Copley Woods (New York: Random
House, 1987), p. 27.

2 David M. Jacobs, Secret Life: Firsthand Accounts of UFO Abductions (New York: Simon
& Schuster, 1992), pp. 305-6.

3 John E. Mack, introduction to Secret Life: Firsthand Accounts of UFO Abductions, by
David M. Jacobs (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), pp. 9— 11.

4 J. Allen Hynek, The UFO Experience: A Scientific Inquiry (New York: Henry Regnery
Co, 1972; Ballantine Books, 1974), p. 2. Page citations are to paperback edition.

5 Hynek's Science letter quoted in David M. Jacobs, The UFO Controversy in America
(Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1975), p. 215.

6 Ibid.

7 Hynek, The UFO Experience, pp. 31-34.

8 Ibid., p. 11.

9 Quoted in Jacobs, UFO Controversy, p. 215.

10 Hynek, The UFO Experience, pp. 31-34.

11 Ibid., p. 34.

12 Thomas E. Bullard, "On Stolen Time: A Summary of a Comparative Study of the UFO
Abduction Mystery" (Mt. Rainier, Md.: Fund for UFO Research, June 1987), p. 40.

13 Ibid., p. 13.

II. AT THE CONFERENCE: DAY ONE

1 John E. Mack, Introduction to Secret Life: Firsthand Accounts of UFO Abductions, by
David M. Jacobs (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), p. 12.

2 Jacobs, pp. 95-96.

3 John S. Carpenter, commentary in "Unusual Personal Experiences: An Analysis of the
Data f rom Three National Surveys," conducted by the Roper Organization (Las Vegas,
Nev.: Bigelow Holding Corporation, 1992), p. 51.

III. AT THE CONFERENCE: DAY TWO

1 Carpenter, introduction to "Unusual Personal Experiences," p. 21.

2 Ibid., pp. 21-22.

3 Ibid., p. 25.

452

Notes

IV. AT THE CONFERENCE: DAY THREE

1 Louis Joseph Vance quoted in J . Bryan III, Hodge Podge; A Commonplace Book (New
York: Atheneum, 1986), p. 47.

2 David M. Jacobs letter, in Journal of UFO Studies 3, quoted by Keith Basterfield in pri-
vate correspondence with author.

3 Keith Basterfield, "Maureen Puddy: An Australian Abductee Physically Present During
an Abduction." Private correspondence with author, May 1992, photocopy.

4 Ibid.

5 Ibid.

6 Keith Basterfield, private correspondence with author, 9 July 1992.

7 "Induced Psychotic Disorder (Shared Psychotic Disorder)," in Desk Reference to the Di-
agnostic Criteria (American Psychiatric Association), p. 123.

8 John S. Carpenter, "Double Abduction Case: Correlation of Hypnosis Data," Journal of
UFO Studies (1991), pp. 91-92.

9 Ibid., pp. 92-93.

10 Ibid., p. 99.

11 Ibid., p. 100.

12 Thomas E. Bullard, On Stolen Time: A Summary of a Comparative Study of the UFO Ab-
duction Mystery (Mt. Rainier, Md.: Fund for UFO Research, June 1987) , p. 40.

13 Carpenter, "Double Abduction Case," p. no.

14 Ibid., p. no.

15 Ibid.

16 Ibid.

17 Ibid.

18 Ibid., p. in.

19 Ibid.

20 Ibid.

21 Ibid., p. 112.

22 Ibid.

23 Ibid.

24 Ibid.

25 Ibid.

26 Ibid., p. 113.

27 Ibid.

28 Ibid.

29 Ibid., p. 108.

30 Ibid., p. 102.

31 Ibid., p. 102.

32 John S. Carpenter, commentary in "Unusual Personal Experiences: An Analysis of the
Data from Three National Surveys," conducted by the Roper Organization (Las Vegas,
Nev.: Bigelow Holding Corporation, 1992), p. 52.

Notes

453

33 Ibid.

34 Ibid.

35 Ibid.

36 Ibid.

37 David M. Jacobs, Life: Firsthand Accounts of UFO Abductions (New York: Simon
& Schuster, 1992), p. 246.

38 Kenneth Arnold, quoted in David C. Knight, ed., UFOs: A Pictorial History from An-
tiquity to the Present (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1979), pp. 31-33.

39 Ibid., p. 34.

40 Edward J. Ruppelt in Jay David, ed., The Flying Saucer Reader (New York: New Amer-
ican Library, 1967). PP- 17~»5-

41 Ibid. p. 25; Jacobs, UFO Controversy, pp. 75-79.

42 Lonnie Zamora, Hector Quintanilla, and J. Allen Hynek quoted in Knight, UFOs: A
Pictorial History, pp. 114-18.

43 Hynek quoted in Knight, UFOs: A Pictorial History, pp. 132-33.

44 Jacobs, UFO Controversy, pp. 278-79; and Knight, UFOs: A Pictorial History, pp.
178-79.

45 Timothy Good, Above Top Secret: The Worldwide UFO Cover-Up (New York: William
Morrow & Co., 1988), p. 369.

46 Linda Moulton Howe, An Alien Harvest (Littleton, Colo.: Linda Moulton Howe Pro-
ductions, 1989), p. 270.

47 William J. Broad, "Wreckage in the Desert Was Odd but Not Alien," New York Times,
September 18, 1966, pp. iA, 40A.

48 Gerald Hawkins, quoted in Ivars Peterson, "Geometric Harvest: Euclid's Crop Circles"
Science News 141, no. 5, pp. 76-77.

49 Ibid., p. 77.

50 Gerald S. Hawkins, Beyond Stonehenge (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), p. 72.

51 Readers interested in a more detailed examination of the crop circle phenomenon
should read Linda Moulton Howe's most recent book, Glimpses of Other Realities: Vol-
ume I: Facts and Eyewitnesses (Huntingdon Valley, Pa.: Linda Moulton Howe Produc-
tions, P.O. Box 538, Huntingdon Valley, PA 19006).

52 James Harder, quoted in Jacobs, UFO Controversy, p. 236.

53 John Mack, "What Is Psychologically Anomalous About Abductions: A Challenge for
the Mental Health Field," in book of abstracts prepared for Abduction Study Confer-
ence by Andrea Pritchard (1992), p. IV-B, photocopy.

54 Ronald K. Siegel, Fire in the Brain: Clinical Tales of Hallucination (New York: Dutton,
1992), pp. 83-85.

55 Ibid., p. 6.

56 Ibid., pp. 88-90.

57 Ibid., p. 90.

58 Ibid., p. 87.

4.54

Notes

V. AT THE CONFERENCE: DAY FOUR

1 Thomas E. Bullard, "Folkloric Dimensions of the UFO Phenomenon," Journal of UFO
Studies^ (i99i)> pp- 17-18.

2 Ibid., p. 30.

3 Susan Schiefelbein, The Incredible Machine (Washington, D.C.: The National Geo-
graphic Society, 1986), p. 9.

4 Lewis Thomas, foreword to The Incredible Machine, p. 7.

5 James Trefil, "Phenomena, Comment and Notes," Smithsonian (July 1993), pp. 18-19.

6 Terence McKenna, quoted in John E. Mack, Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens
(New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1994), p. 410.

7 John E. Mack, "The Abduction Phenomenon: A Preliminary Report" (June 1992), p. 15,
photocopy given to author.

g Ibid.

9 Ibid., p. 16.

10 Ibid.

11 Mack, Abduction, p. 19.

12 Mack, "The Abduction Phenomenon," p. 16.

13 Keith Thompson, Angels and Aliens: UFOs and the Mythic Imagination (New York:
Addison-Wesley, 1991), p. 63.

14 Howard Blum, Out There (New York: Pocket Books, 1990), p. 257.

15 Timothy Good, Above Top Secret: The Worldwide UFO Cover-Up (New York: William
Morrow & Co., 1988), p. 255.

16 Unidentified Airman quoted in Above Top Secret, pp. 407-8.

17 Major Ernest J. Edwards quoted in Good, Above Top Secret, pp. 405-6.

18 Stanton J. Friedman and Don Berliner, Crash at Corona (New York: Paragon House,
1992), pp. 195-97.

19 William Moore, quoted in Blum, Out There (New York: Pocket Books, 1991), p. 268.

20 Linda Moulton Howe, Alien Harvest, p. 137.

21 Briefing Document, Operation Majestic 12, in Blum, Out There, p. 316.

22 Good, Above Top Secret, pp. 346-47.

23 Wilbert B. Smith, quoted in Good, Above Top Secret, p. 183.

24 Ibid., p. 478.

25 Harry S Truman, quoted in Good, Above Top Secret, p. 551.

26 William Moore, quoted in Good, Above Top Secret, p. 260.

27 Good, Above Top Secret, pp. 476-77.

28 Ibid., p. 478.

29 David M. Jacobs, Secret Life: Firsthand Accounts of UFO Abductions (New York: Simon
& Schuster, 1992), p. 37.

30 Good, Above Top Secret, p. 346.

Notes

455

31 James Harder, quoted in Good, Above Top Secret, p. 346.

32 Good, Above Top Secret, p. 259.

33 Donald Menzel, quoted in David C. Knight, ed., UFOs: A Pictorial History from Antiq-
uity to the Present (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1979), p. 91.

34 Good, Above Top Secret, pp. 545-50.

35 William Moore and Jaime Shandera in Blum, Out There, p. 270.

36 Howe, An Alien Harvest, p. 253.

37 "The Mystery at Groom Lake," "Periscope" in Newsweek, November 1, 1993, p. 4.

VIII. POSTCONFERENCE INTERVIEW: DAVID E. PRITCHARD, PH.D.

I David E. Pritchard, "Post Conference Investigation and Updated Conclusions," in
Alien Discussions: Proceedings of the Abduction Study Conference [in press], p. 295.

XI. POSTCONFERENCE INTERVIEW: JOHN E. MACK

1 John E. Mack, "The UFO Phenomenon: What Does It Mean for the Expansion of
Human Consciousness?" (paper presented at the International Transpersonal Associa-
tion Conference, Prague, Czechoslovakia, June 1992), pp. 3-5.

2 Ibid., pp. 1-2.

3 John E. Mack, "The Abduction Phenomenon: A Preliminary Report" (June 1992),
pp. 4-5, photocopy.

4 Ibid., pp. 9-12.

5 Ibid., p. 40.

6 Ibid., p. 49.

7 Ibid., pp. 37-39.

8 Ibid., p. 50.

9 Ibid., pp. 59-60.

10 Ibid., pp. 55-56.

11 Rilke quote photocopied and given to author by Mack.

XIV. POSTCONFERENCE INTERVIEW: CAROL AND ALICE

FIRST HYPNOSIS SESSION AT BUDD HOPKINs's STUDIO

I John Mack, transcript of tape-recorded talk given at "Interface," Cambridge, Mass.,
April 23, 1993.

XVII. POSTCONFERENCE INTERVIEW: CAROL AND ALICE
THIRD HYPNOSIS SESSION AT BUDD HOPKINS'S STUDIO

I Dr. Jayne Gackenbach, "Frameworks for Understanding Lucid Dreaming: A Review,"
Dreaming 1, no. 2 (1991), p. 109.

456

Notes

2 Fred Alan Wolf, The Dreaming Universe (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994), p. 192.

3 John E. Mack, Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens (New York: Charles Scribner's
Sons, 1994), p- 4°7-

XX. VARIOUS THEORIES

1 Keith Thompson, "The UFO Experience As a Crisis of Transformation," in Spiritual
Emergency, edited by Stanislav and Christina Grof (1989), pp. 124-25, photocopy.

2 Kenneth Arnold, quoted in David C. Knight, ed., UFOs: A Pictorial History from An-
tiquity to the Present (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1979) , p. 33.

3 Philip J. Klass, quoted in Stephen Rae, "John Mack," New York Times Magazine, March
20, 1993, p. 33.

4 Budd Hopkins, Intruders: The Incredible Visitations at Copley Woods (New York: Ran-
dom House, 1987), p. 179.

5 John Mack, Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens (New York: Charles Scribner's
Sons, 1994), p. 25.

6 Ibid., p. 43.

7 Letter from young Minnesota woman in Hopkins, Intruders, pp. 197-98.

8 Thompson, "The UFO Experience," p. 132.

9 Ibid., p. 134.

10 Mack, Abduction, p. 415.

11 Ibid., pp. 415-16.

12 Ibid., p. 319.

13 Thompson, "The UFO Experience," p. 132.

14 Mack, Abduction, p. 417.

15 Mack, Abduction, p. 398.

16 Whitley Strieber, Transformation: The Breakthrough (New York: William Morrow &
Co.), p. 236.

17 Whitley Strieber in Thompson, "The UFO Experience," p. 127.

18 Mack, Abduction, p. 400.

19 J. Bryan III, Hodge Podge: A Commonplace Book (New York: Atheneum, 1986), p. 200.

20 Keith Thompson, Angels and Aliens, p. 400.

21 J. Allen Hynek, quoted in Thompson, Angels and Aliens, p. 80.

22 Thompson, Angels and Aliens, p. 101.

23 Ezek. 1: 4-7.

24 Ezek. 2: 1-2; 3: 12-14.

25 Joseph Smith, quoted in Thompson, Angels and Aliens, p. 70.

26 A. H. Clough, Introduction to Plutarch's Lives, quoted in Thompson, Angels and Aliens,
p. 120.

27 Samuel Coccius, quoted in Thompson, Angels and Aliens, p. 70.

Notes

457

28 Knight, UFOs: A Pictorial History, p. 25.

29 JohnToland, quoted in J. Bryan III, Hodge Podge Two: Another Commonplace Book (New
York: Atheneum, 1989), p. 10.

30 Thompson, Angels and Aliens, p. 70.

31 Ibid., pp. 152-54.

32 Quoted in Thompson, Angels and Aliens, 154-55.

33 H. Chiang, "UFO Sightings and Research in Modern China," in MUFON ipps Inter-
national UFO Proceedings, quoted in Mack, Abduction, p. 12.

34 Jacques Vallee, quoted in Thompson, Angels and Aliens, p. 154.

35 Ibid., p. 10.

36 Mack, Abduction, p. 10.

37 Vallee, quoted in Mack, Abduction, p. 96.

38 Jacques Vallee, Dimensions: A Casebook of Alien Contact (New York: Ballantine Books,
1988), pp. 143-44.

39 Mack, Abduction, p. 406.

40 Ibid., p. 406.

41 Richard Tarnas, quoted in Mack, Abduction, p. 420.

42 Thompson, Angels and Aliens, p. xi.

43 Mack, Abduction, p. 421.

44 Carl Jung, Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press,
1978), p. 6.

45 Jung, quoted in Thompson, Angels and Aliens, p. 42.

46 Thompson, Angels and Aliens, p. 43.

47 Ibid., p. 4.

48 Fred Alan Wolf, The Dreaming Universe (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994), p. 43.

49 Ibid., p. 227.

50 Ibid., p. 226.

51 Ibid., pp. 227-28.

52 Ibid., p. 228.

53 Michael Grosso, quoted in Wolf, The Dreaming Universe, p. 224.

54 Wolf, The Dreaming Universe, p. 224.

55 Ibid., p. 225.

56 Ibid., p. 243.

57 Rupert Sheldrake, quoted in Stephen Clark's review of Sheldrake's A New Science of Life
[London] Times Literary Supplement, March 12, 1982, p. 279.

58 Wolf, The Dreaming Universe, p. 244.

59 Thompson, Angels and Aliens, p. 39.

60 Kenneth Ring, quoted in Wolf, The Dreaming Universe, p. 244.

61 Wolf, The Dreaming Universe, pp. 246-47.

458

Notes

62 Ibid., p. 601.

63 Ibid., p. 63.

64 Ibid., pp. 247-48.

65 Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (New
York: Houghton Mifflin, 1990), p. 112.

66 Ibid., p. 408.

67 Wolf, The Dreaming Universe, p. 248.

68 Ibid., p. 249.

69 Ibid.

70 Mack, Abduction, p. 70.

71 Wolf, The Dreaming Universe, p. 249.

72 Kenneth Ring, quoted in Wolf, The Dreaming Universe, pp. 249-50.

73 Michael Murphy, quoted in Thompson, Angels and Aliens, p. 227.

74 Thompson, Angels and Aliens, pp. 228—29.

75 David M. Jacobs, Secret Life: Firsthand Accounts of UFO Abductions (New York: Simon
& Schuster, 1992), p. 317.

76 Hopkins, Intruders, p. 193.

77 Wolf, The Dreaming Universe, p. 230.

78 Mack, Abduction, p. 407.

79 Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness, p. 134.

80 Vaclav Havel, "The New Measure of Man," New York Times, July 8, 1994, p. A27.

81 Nicholas Wade, "Method and Madness: A Fable for Fleas," The New York Times Maga-
zine, August 14, 1994, p. 18.

82 David E. Pritchard, private correspondence with author, December 7, 1994.

83 Kurt Vonnegut, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (New York: Dell Publishing Company,
1970), p 18.

84 Thompson, Angels and Aliens, pp. 229-30.

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Stringfield (privately printed).

Talbot, M. The Holographic Universe. New York: HarperCollins, 1991.

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Abduction Study Conference. In press.

Thomas, L. Introduction to The Incredible Machine. Washington: National Geographic So-
ciety, 1986.

Thompson, K. Angels and Aliens: UFOs and the Mythic Imagination. New York: Addison-
Wesley Publishing Company, 1991.

. "The UFO Experience As a Crisis of Transformation," in Spiritual Emergency

edited by Stanislav & Christina Grof. 1989.

Trefil, J. "Phenomena, Comment, and Notes." Smithsonian, July 1993, pp. 18-19.

Vallee, J. Dimensions: A Casebook of Alien Contact. New York: Ballantine Books, 1988.

. Passport to Magonia. Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1969.

Vonnegut, K. God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater. New York: Dell Publishing Co., 1970.

Wade, N. "Method and Madness: A Fable for Fleas." The New York Times Magazine, Sep-
tember 14, 1994, p. 18.

Walton, T. The Walton Experience. New York: Berkeley Books, 1978.

Westrum, R. "Social Dynamics of Abduction Reporting," in Alien Discussions: Proceedings
of the Abduction Study Conference. In press.

Wolf, F. A. The Dreaming Universe. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994.

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* Anyone wishing the complete 600-plus-page illustrated Alien Discussions: Proceedings
of the Abduction Study Conference— -carefully edited, indexed, and updated by Andrea
Pritchard, David E. Pritchard, John E. Mack, Pam Kasey, and Claudia Yapp — may obtain
it by sending a check for $69.95 (which includes handling and postage within the United
States) to Proceedings, P. O. Box 241, North Cambridge Post Office, Cambridge, MA
02140.

Index

abductee, definition of, 13, 14
Abduction (Mack), 420, 430-2
abductions, UFO, 9-10

abductee realization of, 37-40
alien procedures during, 5, 16-21, 26-33,
34-40, 49, 50-6, 74, 75, 80-8, 92-102,
115-16, 131, 150, 157-8, 213-14, 241, 244-8,
251-2, 257-8, 270-1, 280-1, 284-92,
i99-3«. 330-3, 337. 348-57. 370-81, 394-9,
406-15, 417
of children, 37, 41-3, 51-8, 63-5, 90, 145B.,
164, 200, 223, 257, 260, 264-6, 294-6,
316-33. 353-7. 363-4. 384. 418-19. 441
consistency of accounts, 261, 418, 430
demographics of, 6, 9-10, 14, 15, 33, 37, 41,
46, 65, 68, 125, 159, 200, 224, 235-6, 256,
264

folklore parallels to, 142-5, 424-34, 438
generational, 52-9, 63, 294-7, 329-33, 334— J-

354-7. 383-6
of Betty and Barney Hill, 4-5, 31, 35, 41, 112,

144

location of, 70, 72, 74

long-term relationships in, 14, 303, 383

medical examinations during, 5, 17-20, 21,
26, 34-40, 49-51 and n., 52-3, 55-6, 67, 74,
75, 82-7, 92-102, 115—16, 131, 150, 158,
213-14, 241, 244, 247, 257-8, 270-1, 280-1,
288-92, 299-311, 330-3, 337, 348-57,
370-4. 394-5. 406-15, 417, 4^0

M.I.T. conference on (1992), 3-6, 9-200

multiple, 75-88, 249, 296

order of events in, 80

Pascagoula incident, 115-16, 129

physical descriptions of aliens, 4, 17, 18, 21,
28-32, 43, 49, 56, 61-6, 68, 83-4, 90, 115,
116, 120, 153, 213-14, 220, 240-1, 246-7,
251, 280, 290-1, 308-9, 349. 354. 372.
393-6, 436

psychological state of abductees, 36-40, 53,
"5-33. 139. 146-7. 150-1. 158, 163, 198-200,
241-2, 256-72, 418

theories, 416-49

Walton (Travis) case, 115, 116-17, 1*9, 144

witnesses to, 90-8, 158, 161, 256, 279-80, 423
See also aliens; amnesia; levitation; light phe-
nomena; missing-time episodes; physical
evidence of abductions; research, abduction-
phenomenon; sightings, UFO; spacecraft,
alien; specific cases and locations

Aboard a Flying Saucer (Bethurum), 8

Above Top Secret: The Worldwide UFO Cover-Up
(Good), H7«.-i8n., 116, I74«., 176 and «.,
I90n.-i«.

Adamski, George, 8, 112

Flying Saucers Have Landed 8

advertisements, UFOs depicted in, 161

Aerial Phenomena Research Organization
(APRO), 116, 129, 176*1., 190

age of abductees, 10, 37, 41, 65, 68, 125, 200,
264-6

AIDS, 20, 26, 173

Air Defense Command, 110

Air Force, U.S., 6-7, 105, 187

involvement with UFOs, 6—7, 105-21,
166-97, 229. 248-9, 276

Air Force Office of Special Investigations
(AFOSI), 105, 118-19, 176B., 195

Air Route Traffic Control (ARTC), 108-10

airships, 427-8 and n.

Air Technical Intelligence Center (ATIC), 189
Alexander, John, 178
aliens, 8, 13

civilization of, 243-4

corpses found in crashes, 120, 174 and «.,
182-4, 193. 195

drawings of, 16, 43, 55-8, 96-7

human trust in, 132-3, 145-50

hybrid children of, 38, 51, 164, 260, 314, 333,
334. 349-54, 370-4. 381, 417. 420

names, 22-3

odors, 20, 210, 211, 280, 393, 413, 415

opposing forces of, 173 n.

physical descriptions of, 4, 17, 18, 21, 28-32,
43. 49. 56, 61-6, 68, 83-4, 90, 115, 116,
120, 153, 213-14, 220, 240-1, 246-7, 251,
280, 290-1, 308-9, 349> 354. 372. 393-6,
436

468

Index

aliens {cont.)

procedures during abductions, 5, 16-21,
*6-33. 34-40, 49, 50-5, 74, 75, 80-8,
92-102, 115-16, 131, 150, 157-8, 213-14, 241,
244-8, 251-2, 257-8, 270-1, 280-1, 284-92,
*99-3«. 330-3. 348-57. 370-8I, 394-9,
406-15, 417
types of, 4, 17, 18, 21, 28-32, 43, 56-7, 61, 64,

68, 74-5, 83-4, 90, 251, 334, 393-6
See also abductions, UFO; sightings, UFO

American Association for the Advancement of
Science, 7, 154

American-made saucers, 166-73

amnesia, 17, 25, 79-80, 86, 87, 89, 92, 127,
144-5, 247. *82, 318, 419, 430

Anatomy of a Phenomenon (Vallee), 423

ancillary experiences, 17

Andreasson, Betty, 336

Andrews Air Force Base, 108-10

Andromeda Galaxy, 155

angels, 421,430

Angels and Aliens: UFOs and the Mythic Imagi-
nation (Thompson), 420
Angelucci, Orfeo, 8, 9

Secret of the Saucers, 8
animals, 304-8

mutilations and abductions of, 102-4, 10 5.
112, 117, 119, 124, 173«., 427
anthropic cosmological principle, 444-6
apparitions, 40
Appelle, Dr. Stuart, 199
archetypes, 434, 435
Archulete Peak, N.M., 165, 173 and n.
Argentina, 75
Arizona, 121, 195

Army Sacramento Peak Frequency Surveillance

Station, 165, 177
Arnold, Kenneth, 106-7, 183, 237, 416
association with UFOs, 264, 418
astronomy, 78-9, 152-5, 160
Atlantis, 8

"Aurora" aircraft, 196

Australian abductions, 40, 70-5, 257

authenticity of abductees, 259-60, 269, 418

autism, 342

autokinesis, 79

Aviation Week and Space Technology, 166, 185
Aztec crash (New Mexico), 121, 195

Babbitt, Bruce, 196

Baker, Robert, M., 129

balloons, powered, 428 and n.

Barrie, ]. M., Peter Pan, 144, 197

Bartlett, Alice, 58-9, 201-30, 282-314, 315-33,

339-57. 358-82, 393-401, 402-15, 417-18,

420
Basel, 426

Basterfield, Keith, 40-1, 70-5, 257

Bayesian analysis, 161 and n.

believability of abductees, 259-60, 269, 418

Bennewitz, Dr. Paul, 173 n.

Benson, Tom, 16

Berkner, Dr. Lloyd V., 184, 192-3

Berliner, Don, 212, 215

Berry, Thomas, 273-4

Betholon, Pierre, 160

Bethurum, Truman, 8, 112

Aboard a Flying Saucer, 8
Bigelow, Robert, 33, 43-4
Black Budget, 167, 175, 180-2
"black helicopters," 229
Blake, William, 274
Blanchard, Colonel William, 174H.
blighted ovum, 99
blood specimens, 303-4
Blum, Howard, 173B.

Out There, 166, 173 and «., 178
bodily invasion, see physical examinations, alien
Boiling Air Force Base, 108-9
Boston, 158
Bower, Douglas, 122

Boylan, Richard J., 129-31, 160, 162, 165-82,

196-7, 237-49
brain disturbances, 438-40
Brand, Stewart, 4
Brazel, William, 174M.
Brazilian abductions, 74

breeding experiments, 4, 5, 17-20, 21, 35, 50-2, 67,
74. 75. 85. 9*. 98-102, 131, 150, 158, 225, 244,
270-1, 348-57, 371-4, 383, 407, 417, 420, 431;
see also hybrid alien/human children

"Briefing Paper for the President of the United
States on the Subject of Identified Aerial
Vehicles (IAVs)," 195-6

British UFO Research Association, 20

Broida Prize, 3

Bronk, Dr. Detlev, 189-91

Brookhaven National Laboratory, 189

Brown, Thomas Townsend, 185

Bruno, Joanne, 126-8

Brunstein, Karl, 276

Bryan, Colonel Joseph III, 190/3.-1 n.

buffs, UFO, 7

Bullard, Thomas E., 9-10, 14, 22, 27, 31, 32, 49,
80-8, 131, 141-5, 150-1, 161, 275, 431
"Folkloric Dimensions of the UFO Phenom-
enon," 142

"On Stolen Time: A Summary of a Compara-
tive Study of the UFO Abduction Mys-
tery," 9-10, 14, 80
"The Overstated Danger of Hypnosis," 144-5
"The Rarer Abduction Episodes," 27
"Variety of Abduction Beings," 31
Bulletin of Anomalous Experience, 198
Bush, Dr. Vannevar, 184, 185-6, 189, 192, 195
Bush administration, 181

Index

469

California, 9, 166, 180, 237-9, 4 2 7

Cambridge Hospital, Harvard Medical School, 3

Canada, 112, 186

Carpenter, John S., 25-6, 30-1, 33, 38, 41, 76-89,
140, 158, 227, 260

"Other Types of Aliens," 30

"Resolution of Phobias from UFO Data," 38
Carter, Brandon, 444
Carter, Jimmy, 117 and n. t n8«.
catalogued UFO information, 14
Center for Human Genome Studies, 173
Center for Psychological Studies in the Nuclear
Age, 3

Central Intelligence Agency, 105, 112, n8«., 178,

182, 184-92
Central Intelligence Group, 191
Cherniack, David, 129, 165
Chicago, 13

child abductees, 37, 41-3, 51-8,63-5, 90, 145H.,
164, 200, 223, 257, 260, 264-6, 294-6,
316-33, 353-7. 363-4, 384, 418-19, 44i

childbirth, 349-53

childhood sexual abuse, 127, 129, 131, 224, 232-3,

261-2, 340, 354-7, 371-3, 440-1
children, 224

hybrid/alien human, 38, 51, 164, 260, 314, 333,
334, 349-54, 370~4> 381, 4I7> 420

missing fetuses, 98-102, 234, 264
Chiles, Clarence S., 111
Chiles- Whitted sighting, in
China, UFO sighting in, 430H.
Chorley, David, 122
Clarion, 8

Close Encounters, 7-9

of the First Kind, 8, 438

of the Second Kind, 8, 438

of the Third Kind, 8-9

of the Fourth Kind, 9
Close Encounters of the Third Kind (film), 7, 20,

202, 425
close-range sightings, 7-8
clothing, loss of, 310, 315
Clough, A. H., Introduction to Plutarch's Lives,
416

Coccius, Samuel, 426
collective mental phenomenon, 13
collective unconscious, 433-7
color blindness, 26

communication, telepathic, 14, 22, 66, 72, 84-8,
126, 252-3, 290, 300-11, 331-3, 417, 425.
435-6

Communion (Strieber), 20, 22-3, 69, 144, 264, 420
composite encounter model, 36-7
Condon, Dr. Edward, 189-90
Condon Report, 189-90
Congress, 3, 181, 182

consistency of abduction accounts, 261, 418, 430
Constantine, Emperor, 426

contactee cases, 8-9, 14, 15, 112, 141-2; see also

specific cases
contactee syndrome, 112
continuously habitable zone, 154
control of nature, 254-6, 272—8
Corbin, Henri, 435

Corona crash (New Mexico), 174 and n.
Cortile, Linda, 90-8, 140, 256, 264, 279, 315,
334> 335

Cosmic Top Secret (Hamilton), 166, 169, 180
Council, 23-4, 36

Coyote Canyon Test Site, 176 and n.-j and n.
crashed flying saucers, 119-20 and «., 121, 174

and 176H., 182-97
crop circles, 121-3

Crow, Lieutenant General Duward, nSn.
CUFOS, 13, 77, 125, 159
cycle interval, 37
Czechoslovakia, 254-6, 444

Darwin, Charles, 153

Daylight Discs, 7

Dean, Gwen, 138-9, 142

Dedham, Carol, 53-9, 64, 201-30, 282-314,

3i5-33» 339-57. 358-82, 383-401, 402-20
Defense Nuclear Agency, 165, 175
delusional disorders, 241-2, 262-3, 3*6
Democritus, 416

demographics of UFO abductions, 6, 9-10, 14,
J 5> 33. 37. 41. 46, 65, 68, 125, 159, 200, 224,
235-6, 256, 264

Denver, 102-3

Department of Defense Intelligence Agency, 105
Department of Energy, 165, 167, 173-5
Devereux, Paul, 437-8
Dexter-Hillsdale sighting, 112, 114— 15
Dimensions: A Casebook of Alien Contact

(Vallee), 424
discs, see spacecraft, alien
dissociation, 267-8, 441
DNA manipulation, 75, 124
Doctor Being, 290-1, 299-311, 333, 394
Donderi, D. C, 46-8, 160-2

"Scientific Intelligence Approach to Abduc-
tion Evidence," 160
drawings of aliens, 16, 43, 55-8, 96-7
dreams, 37, 45, 60-2, 74, 88, 282, 305, 336-7,
358-61, 383-4 434, 437
"vivid," 358
dualistic thinking, 255-6, 272-8, 446
dual reference, 29-30, 31, 149, 199, 232-4
Dyson, Freeman, 445

Edgerton, Germhausen & Greer, 175
Edwards, Major Ernest J., 176H.
Eisenhower, Dwight D., 183, 184, 187, 192
electronics, 6, 155-6 and n., 222
Ellsworth Air Force Base, 118

470

Index

encounter-prone personalities, 151
Encounters (Fiore), 239
environmental conservation, 421
envisioning, 20, 21

Essay Concerning Human Understanding, An

(Locke), 416
ethical issues, 198-200, 254-6, 272-8
Euclid, 122

Europe, alien phenomenon cases in, 10, 68,
426-30

evolution, alien-abduction phenomenon as,
420-2

examinations, alien, 4, 5, 17-21, 26-8, 34-40,
49-54. 74, 75. 82-7. 92-3, 98-102, 115-16,
131, 150, 158, 213-14, 241, 244, 247. 257-8,
270-1, 280-1, 288-92, 299-311, 330-3, 337.
348-57. 370-4. 394-5. 406-15, 417. 420

experiencer (term), 16

extraterrestrial hypothesis, 13, 47, 105, 151—7,

190, 231, 275-6, 416, 424
eyesight, changes in, 312-13
Ezekial, Old Testament vision of, 424-6

false memory syndrome, 199, 418
familiar entity, 29-30
fantasized abduction, 49

fantasy-prone individuals, 13, 74. 76. 77. n 5 - 7i 440

Fatima sighting, 428-30

female abductees, 10, 18-19, 21, 33 _ 4> 35. 37.
41-2, 51-64, 65, 68, 76-102, 125, 159, 164,
384; see also specific cases

Fermi, Enrico, 155

Fermi Paradox, 155

fetuses, 98-102

incubating, 21, 27, 52

missing, 98-102, 235, 264

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